Review of Elephant (2015) by Melvin W — 13 Oct 2011

Alex: Eeney... Meeney... Meiny... Moe... Catch a... Tiger... By its... Toe... .

"An ordinary high school day. Except that its not.".

First off, what makes a movie like this good is the complete opposite of most of the movies we watch. Most movies are good of they entertain us and we are able to have fun and laugh during them. In order for Elephant to be a success, it had to be the complete opposite from that. It had to disturb the viewer and leave them feeling less than optimistic. Gus Van Sant definitely succeeded with that. He made a movie that couldn't have been easy or in anyway fun to make because it so damn risky. If anything is done wrong, the film could come off as just an exploitation of situations like Columbine. This doesn't come off like that at all.

Elephant follows a lot of students through their normal everyday lives at their high school. By a lot, I mean a lot. The first hour jumps between students. We follow them through the hallways, to the cafeteria, into the bathroom, into classrooms, into the library and it all makes the viewer feel like they are in a maze. The film isn't linear either, in fact it shows the same tiny events from different people's perspective throughout the movie. As the student body makes their way through a normal day of classes and socializing, two students stay home getting ready to take the school by storm.

Another thing that is important before going into Elephant is to know that it is very artsy. If you don't like movies like that, this will probably be no different. The first hour is an exploration in the tediousness of our everyday life. Van Sant is creating the sense of the average, boring lives we all live on a day to day basis. We walk, we talk, we eat, in the grand scheme of things, nothing much happens. We always hear from people who were near tragedies that it was like any other day. That's basically what Van Sant is saying with the first hour of the movie. He doesn't take any liberties with his approach in order to entertain an audience that can't appreciate his indie style. .

Van Sant is great at creating these realistic, set in high school movies. They are so realistic, that a lot of people won't like them. The actors aren't really acting, but conversing as regular people do in the real world. It's the exact same approach he had with Paranoid Park, which was another great artsy independent film. People will be easily bored by the film as we spend minutes just following a character from a soccer field, all the way across some school land, through one door where he takes three or four turns in the hallways and finally arrives at his destination 5 minutes later. .

The film has an unsettling tone right from the beginning, before anything happens. If you walked into the movie as it was starting with no knowledge of the plot; after 10 minutes you would know something crazy was going to happen. The quiet score throughout the whole movie really helps in achieving this tone. You kind of become hypnotized by everything that's going on, or at least I did, and you end up watching the movie without moving or blinking. At the end of this film, I sat through all the credits and still probably sat there five minutes afterwards. I never do that; I think that may be the first time I've sat through an entire thing of credits. .

Another reason many people wouldn't like this is because it ends so abruptly. Van Sant offers no clear motivation by the shooters and no conclusion to how things turned out. This is frustrating for some, but I like it because we don't know why people do this sort of thing. We can come up with all the excuses we want and Van Sant puts some of them in the film, not so much to blame them, but to show why many people think these events occur. These excuses include video games and bullies. These are the same things that many people blame Columbine on, but many don't know that Eric(one of the shooters at Columbine) was a pretty popular kid, who was good with girls and was in no way an outcast. The other one was a little less social, but still in no way an outcast. If you haven't read Columbine by Dave Cullen, I highly recommend it. It will change your whole thought process about Columbine.

Gus Van Sant really does deserve some respect for his accomplishments with Elephant. He made a powerful and sad movie about school shootings without adding any unrealistic melodrama or in anyway exploiting school shootings. He didn't make this movie to make a lot of money and that is quite obvious. .