Elephant

I watched two movies tonight which had a surprising commonality in emotional tone, Elephant and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which had neither raised voices or excited shouting. However in the former it was a conscious strategy by writer/director Gus Van Zant and in the latter it was just Bill Murray getting a paycheck with the absolute minimum energy expended; Van Zant had me on edge through this device and Life Aquatic had me and TS1 asleep inside of an hour.

Elephant is a small film without plot. Essentially a meditation on a morning like what happened in Columbine, the cameras follow a few of the students at a sprawling suburban high school. The cameras simply stand at eye level, sometimes in front and sometimes behind, with long continuous shots as one or another of the kids walk the halls; the scenes aren’t even shown in any obvious sequence until the focal character walks into a shot we’ve already seen from a different angle. At times the long walks with only the back of a student’s head in frame made little sense.

Van Zant finally clues us in as two of the boys hang out: one picks up the other’s laptop and starts playing a game called Body Count. Unlike real video games this features no outrageous graphics, big blasts and fountains of blood, just potential victims walking away from the shooter’s perspective on an empty, colorless desert landscape. When shot they fall over and the player turns to find another target.

Elephant makes no attempt to explain or justify the boys’ actions, other than a brief classroom bully attack on one, and I was especially puzzled having the two take sex shower before calmly packing several duffelbags with explosives, guns and ammunition. A wordless drive gets them to school mid-morning and they stroll (okay, at times jog) through the same long halls and shoot anyone they see. In the next to last scene they meet up and after casually inquiring as to the number of kills, one shoots the other.

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