Elephant

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Elephant

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Elephant

Alex Frost, Carrie Finklea, Elias McConnell, Eric Deulen, John Robinson

A tale about high school violence that unfolds on an ordinary school day, inside an American high school, filled with schoolwork, football, gossip and socializing. For each of the students we meet, hi...( read more  read more... )gh school is a different experience: stimulating, friendly, traumatic, lonely, hard.

Id: 10895058

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Recent Reviews

Elephant Recent Reviews
  • 76Majikat
    August 19, 2009
    76Majikat
    Disturbingly realistic and a controversial topic to tackle. Certainly through the first half, it was very mundane and I found it difficult to keep watching, but of course in hindsight it?s certainly worth staying with to feel the impact of the finish.

    Filmed in a sort of Docu...( read more)mentary style, it?s certainly unique in it?s delivery, any other way would probably have disrespected many of the true events that have taken part in schools across America.

    One of a kind.
  • smith44
    June 7, 2009
    smith44
    Unforgettable. Dealing with a high school shoot out, the film has uncommon insight in the lives and minds of the teenage killers. Brilliant. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival. The second installment in Gus Van Saint's Death series.
  • evillincoln
    March 31, 2009
    evillincoln
    Gus Van Sant must be taleneted because he made what is essentially an hour and ten minutes of kids walking around a high school given this whole other depth - a lot like paranoid park.
  • EarthlyAlien
    January 19, 2009
    EarthlyAlien
    Girl in Cafeteria: "What are you writing?
    Alex: Uh, this? It's my plan.
    Girl in Cafeteria: For what?
    Alex: Oh, you'll see."

    ...( read more)//i172.photobucket.com/albums/w25/EarthlyAlien/elephant.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket">

    Gus Van Sant's Elephant, at first blush, seems on an inexorable path to controversy. The film that put a stop to the nine-year absence of American cinema from the list of Palme d'Or winners, it is a quietly horrifying, fictional exploration of a Columbine-like school shooting... but one with little - or absolutely no - moralizing about its subjects. The film projects a cavernous, labyrinthine American educational system that has little understanding of the deeper social forces affecting its students. Perhaps most provocative, the two male killers share a pre-annihilation kiss. Add political fire-storm, mix well, and serve.

    These details, however, misrepresent the undeniably compelling nature of Van Sant's mesmeric film. Told in sparse, improvised dialogue that erupts between longer, langorous passages of time, Elephant strips the tragic sentimentality from this particular social catastrophe, allowing viewers to look reflectively at a larger context. It is moving, yes, and sad too. But it's also fine, magnificent work that makes one re-consider preconceived notions about Columbine?s massacre and its causes. It is important, timely, and visionary cinema.

    Considering that Van Sant revelled in unchecked sentimentalism when he directed another story about two mixed-up boys (Good Will Hunting), the cool, even tone of Elephant is refreshing and unexpected; it is, perhaps not surprisingly, the best film of his career. His cast, comprised of over a dozen untrained teenagers in Portland, Oregon, reach astonishing heights under his direction, inhabiting their high-school trajectories with disarming honesty and adolescent ritual. Improvised dialogue can often be indulgent and grating, but here the cast?s personal experiences imbue it with a clarity no screenwriter could have attained. Particularly outstanding are John Robinson as a social butterfly who must care for his alcoholic father, and Alex Frost as the social outcast who takes solace in classical piano and internet gun websites.

    Unhurried and unconstricted, Van Sant follows a very particular and personal vision, reflected most exquisitely in the cinematography of Harris Savides. The camera floats ethereally around the campus, a seemingly endless connection of nondescript hallways, vacant gymnasiums, and personality-beige classrooms. Savides fills each frame with a classical grandeur, a rolling beauty that underscores both the banal commonality of high school life and the missed opportunities in every moment. It is as if the camera is telling us that life is precious... and no one is there to listen. Savides' images are complemented by an outstanding score - a collection of songs chosen by Van Sant himself - that enhances the elegiac quality of the filmmaking. The music of Beethoven, in particular, resonates superbly in the film's atmospheric aura.

    Much was made of the details of the story, where controversy would always find plenty to rear its ugly head about. The final strength of Elephant, however, is not in these particular plot points, but in its steady, sharp focus on the larger picture. The murders, we all know, are horrific. But the blissful, unaware hours that precede them - which make up the majority of the film - are even more so. The minutiae of high school life becomes electrically charged by the misery we know is imminent, but Elephant never tips its emotional hand to exploit this. The tension stays firmly in us, and not the students - they are dramatically unprepared for cataclysm when it occurs. When tragedy finally does arrive, even we who knew what was coming are unprepared for its impact. What in the hands of a lesser director might have become overwrought or maudlin is instead a cool, dispassionate sadness at the inevitably of a culture gone awry.

    Elephant's greatest achievement is to remove the veil of history from these events, making the unreal real again. Great art undoes its viewer, in order to remake us. On that score, Van Sant has scored an unreserved triumph. And I'm sure that Béla Tarr was proud to have influenced such fine cinema.

    "So foul and fair a day I have not seen."
  • DrZeek
    September 25, 2008
    DrZeek
    "I came to realize since I had no need to make a lot of money, I should make films I find interesting, regardless of their outcome and audience."

    This is a quote from director Gus Van Sant, who, after achieving success from directing Good Will Hunting, has mostly (especially aft...( read more)er the horrible Psycho remake experiment) decided to remain in the indie scene, making different, experimental films. This is a film that leaves a bad taste in your mouth but is admirable for a few reasons.

    Girl in Cafeteria: What are you writing?
    Alex: Uh, this? It's my plan.
    Girl in Cafeteria: For what?
    Alex: Oh, you'll see.

    The film is a fictitious retelling of the Columbine High School Murders, in which two male students walked into school on an ordinary day, armed with an assortment of weapons, and proceeded to kill a number of students. No conclusive motive was found, besides the fact that the students were considered "social outcasts."

    John McFarland: Hey, what are you guys doing?
    Alex: Get the fuck out and don't come back! Some heavy shit's going down!

    In this film, we are shown the perspective through the eyes of a number of characters before the event occurs and during. These scenes are all done with long tracking shots, where mainly nothing happens besides watching students walk around the school with little dialog. The dialog that does transpire is mainly improvised and consists of random high school chatter.

    I am not really gonna explain what I believe the point that I got out of this is, but the film certainly does not try to explain any of the characters actions, in favor of letting audiences feel out to what they believe happened.

    Now with that being said, knowing that the film will not offer any sort of opinion and knowing what actually happened in real life, what is the point of this movie in the first place? It is of course very slow placed, since nothing really goes on until the violence starts, and knowing that this violence is going to happen does and doesn't help the film in terms of feeling the building dread that will occur.

    Still, this film is well made in terms of what its doing. It goes against most conventions besides the convention of being different because its an art house film. And it is effectively creepy at certain points.

    John McFarland: Excuse me sir, don't go in there!
  • g1pp4l
    December 7, 2009
    g1pp4l
    Such a huge amount of crap. Watch 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance and you will realize this doesn't have the slightest bit of merit.
  • ahmedsniper2003
    December 4, 2009
    ahmedsniper2003
    An artistic film that is surely not for everyone. Only realistic films fans may find it good but if you are not one of them really donot bother watching. A crazy and a scary plot about high school shooting that takes place from time to time in the states'knowing that this events ...( read more)may have happened is what makes this film really creepy. Directing is only element that you can talk about in a film like this, acting,character development, editing and cinematography are not that important in realistic films, and I can say that Gus Van Sant did a fine job as this film could not be better than the way it was.
  • stilettokillerz
    November 8, 2009
    stilettokillerz
    Nice cinematography but the plot fails to impress as it actually did not really focusing on the 2 school shooters.
  • ahhh1989
    October 27, 2009
    ahhh1989
    Such a shocking, evil, dark film, but honest and brilliant in that it provides no answers.
  • youthagainstfascism1
    October 21, 2009
    youthagainstfascism1
    The movie is not original just the fact somebody was brave enough to tackle such a controversial movie. I thought it was realistic in every sense and I didn't mind the extremely long regular scenes. I felt a big relativity to it though in the people, not the scenario at the end...( read more). I thought it was quite interesting and realistic the way the people don't take the noises at the end very seriously. Finally though somebody was able to convey the emotional strain that people recieve during school now people will know why high school kids are so miserable.
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