Review of Elephant (2010) by Ryan M — 31 Dec 2011

Gus Van Sant creates a memorable yet shallow and rather pointless film that lets the audience draw their own conclusions from the proceedings. This may have been a smart move, and you have to commend Gus for giving an unbiased account of the proceedings, but frankly, his suggestions as to the cause of the High School shooting are surprisingly infantile.

Some things cannot be explained, and random acts of violence are extremely hard to rationalise and explained logically. If you are going to attempt to suggest the real reason for two kids to shoot up a school, you need to dig a bit deeper, instead of "the big boys picked on me" , "violence in the media made me do it" e.

T.c. Also, a lot of the characters in the school may be played by unprofessional actors, but their characters are surprisingly caricatured (especially the group of popular girls). Van Sant films the entire film at eye level with long takes, making us a part of the school experience, but he adds in a pseudo-arty ending that made me burst out laughing at how bad it truly was.

I would like to take this opportunity to take back what I said about "The Departed" having a horrible ending, that was merely due to disappointment at Marty's lacklustre closing shot, which he's normally very good at ("King Of Comedy", "Raging Bull", "Age Of Innocence" to name a few).

This was an honourable attempt at making a film about a serious matter, but if you can only come up with melodramatic reasonings for random violence, why bother making this film? It is a pointless film, considering this was made by a director who did a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's "Psycho", that's not a big surprise.