Ray Pride

The most un-American act? Ambiguity.

A respected American director I know debuted a third feature at Sundance 2003. Ebert liked it, a few other critics. Most people who saw it there? Withering disdain or outright contempt. One reason? The movie didn't provide cues as to how the filmmakers felt about their eccentric characters.

After the Toronto International Film Festival press-and-industry screening of the heartbreaking, haunting, mostly magnificent "Elephant," two middle-aged men with studio-type voices are at the urinals. Their reaction to Gus Van Sant's gliding, melancholy contemplation of the transient nature of everyday experience and the choking power of inchoate rage is similar to that to my friend's movie. One pisser turns to the other and says, "Gus Van Sant was here right now? I'd fucking punch him. What an irresponsible piece of shit!"

"Elephant," compulsively retracing several moments before violence in a fictional suburban Portland, Oregon high school, is one of a fistful of current American releases about school shootings. But Van Sant is a more idiosyncratic filmmaker than polemicist Michael Moore, who incorporated surveillance footage from the most notorious of school slaughters in "Bowling for Columbine."

"Elephant" is about inexplicable beauty and the fragility of each breath as it is taken. It's autumn. Leaves are falling. The green lawns are strewn with autumn's rustling bursts of color: leaves turn most brilliant just as they are dying. We follow almost a dozen students at a suburban high school, through classrooms, the library, cafeteria, the grassy quad, locker rooms. Faces become landscape. Seemingly inconsequential actions are repeated from multiple points of view. The frame is boxy, shot in the 4:3 ratio of a television screen or videogames; the 16mm box of Frederick Wiseman's black-and-white documentary classic, "High School: or, as Van Sant has pointed out, the format of every badly imagined, fear-inducing instructional film shown to students into the 1980s.

"Elephant," lovingly, beautiful shot by director of photography Harris Savides ("Gerry"), is composed mostly of shots of young walking, sweet, feckless, unaware. "I'm so ready to go to college," one says. "I just want to live to get my license," says another, a tossed-off yet violent figure of speech, "It's not like they're going to kill you." Like the aging industryites in the Toronto toilet, they're unaware of the violence of metaphors and turns of speech embedded in the culture.

"Elephant" is like Kubrick's "The Killing"--a film mimicked in different fashion by Quentin Tarantino in "Reservoir Dogs"--making the movie's present tense unstable in disconcerting yet lyrical fashion. You have three, four hindered people in one place, think of all the potential perspectives, all the subjectivities.

With acknowledged borrowings from the 1970s stylized color of the brilliant, deadpan photographs of Southern seer William Eggleston and the tracking, gliding, lengthy takes of Hungarian maxi-minimalist Bela Tarr, the writer-editor-director is calculated in his choice of influence, his intersection of pretty youth unaware of what their day will bring and the wistful drift of Tarr's tracking shots: "Satantango 90210," anyone?

Beauty dies. Van Sant shoots ghosting white contrails against improbable blue skies. Clouds rush over an Eggleston-style shot of power lines. A dog jumps up in the air just as the shooters enter. It's a scene repeated from several perspectives, and in one, the dog's twirl, leaping into mid-air, magically slows then returns to normal speed. And the kids are uniformly arresting. Van Sant told Amy Taubin in Film Comment, "If you're making a film about high-school kids, they are pretty much all alluring and interesting looking and beautiful, because of their age. Even [the girl mocked by the others in the locker room], is very beautiful. If you were her age, you might not classify her as beautiful, but to me she is. If you're going to stare at the kids for a long time and they're going to be doing basically smile things, you try to find really beautiful kids so that you won't lose interest." But to me she is. This seems the essence of Van Sant's gift in his smaller work, from "Mala Noche" and "My Own Private Idaho" to "Gerry" and "Elephant": this is beauty.

Amoral formalism? Pshaw. I want to know more than what I want to know. Movies are not stagecraft. Film is not a soapbox. "Elephant," an important movie in many elusive yet specific ways, is greater for its mostly ambiguous form. Those who want answers have on a few too-literal instants in "Elephant," which, to some have suggested the shooters may be gay neo-Nazis. Fewer have commented on Timothy Bottoms' drunken dad failing to drive his son to school in the opening scene: as in the Comedy Central series, "That's My Bush," he's a dead ringer for George W. Bush. But, as Van Sant has repeatedly said, "If you don't want problems, we could make a Seabiscuit documentary instead."

"Elephant" is not a cynical film, but a fearful one. It says: It happens. It does not say: This is why. I look at the rest of this terse, eighty-one minute, made-for-HBO movie, of its dreaming of a nightmare, of sudden violence sundering the adolescent illusion of immortality, one cocked trigger from right outside my door--Thursday, midnight, gang members--or just inside your workplace,

"Elephant"'s heavy baggage is in the culture. While I write this, a fragment of Wilco's all-American "Heavy Metal Drummer" plays on the jukebox and I'm stung. "I miss the innocence I've known," Jeff Tweedy singsongs. So does Van Sant. Me, too. Unambiguously.

"Elephant" enters the room Friday.

(2003-11-05)

Also by Ray Pride

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Irish documentary makers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O Briain traveled to Venezuela, the world's fourth-largest exporter of oil, at the end of 2001 to shoot a portrait of democratically elected president Hugo Chavez
(2003-10-29)

Looking for Mr. Bad Cop
Of all the scary places not to go, walking into a room with "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" on the TV is one of my least favorite
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Passed is prologue
Set on a New England campus, mostly in chilly winter, "The Human Stain" is an adaptation of Philip Roth's intense novel about the later years of an academic accused of being un-PC (Anthony Hopkins) who has, in fact, been a black man passing for white for decades
(2003-10-29)

Short Runs
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(2003-10-29)

Acting out
(2003-10-23)

Short Runs
(2003-10-23)

Tip of the Week
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Tip of the Week
(2003-10-16)

Chemistry project
(2003-10-16)

Precious moments
(2003-10-16)

Short Runs
(2003-10-16)

Tip of the Week
(2003-10-08)

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