I saw this recently, and am surprised that it has not yet been discussed here. For those who have not heard of it, it is a film that recreates a Columbine-esque day in an almost documentary-like fashion, following a few characters with long shots as they progress through yet another school day. It was apparently filmed with mostly non-professional actors who improvised a lot of their dialogue…
And it struck home, at least for me. The mundane walkthrough and interactions were brilliantly hypnotic; never have I seen a high school portrayed so convincingly, at such leisure. What bothered me was the break from the documentary aspects as we finally began to follow the two killers.
[SPOILERS COMING]
Perhaps it was meant to be ironic, but showing them watching a Hitler documentary, playing a shoot-em up video game, and especially engaging in a homosexual kiss just grated on my nerves. It seemed like such a superficial treatment of the causes, of the psychology, and I wish it would either have been explored in depth or not at all.
The final act seemed a bit off, as well, as the whole logistics of it seemed to be weird. In a few places, we see kids running around in different directions frantically, when there is a clear exit in view of the camera. Benny (the almost-hero black dude) was kind of a weird cat, the way he was just casually strolling toward one of the killers.
Outside of the final act, I think Elephant was near-perfect, enthralling us with frighteningly realistic normalcy while simultaneously filling us with suspence and tension as we know what is going to happen. I could just feel the self-absorption of the characters and how random and easy it is to be blindsided by the killers. I would have preferred the motives not to have been hinted at superficially, to have just let the killers’ expressions and actions do the talking. The one segment where Alex plays the Fur Elise and the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata (in full!!) was perfect by way of producing raw tension and giving us something of the character without beating us over the head with it, while the shots of the video game and the Hitler doc just felt like a cop-out, a wink to the typical media explanations without providing any real substance.
I’m not sure if the actors’ portrayal gave us enough to go on as far as searching for explanations goes, but this is not a bad thing, simply a choice that was made. They both demonstrated a casual coldness to the morality of what they were doing, but were clearly nervous and on edge in contemplating and executing the grandeur of their plan. When one of them tells the other “Remember, have fun”, I shivered. It hinted at nothing but a mere grasp for significance, as if they purposefully conditioned themselves to turn minor suffering (a bit of bullying was shown in a classroom scene) into an excuse to make the world out to be a monster that deserved to be killed with joy. It’s like how some teens can take up a cause as a way of identifying themselves (I think I did something similar, but with the environment), but in this case, it might be the calculated and focused dehumanization of others. I could just be grasping at straws here, but I think this film is great for its usually quasi-objective style that lends itself to interpretation and musings, and it’s a bit of a shame that it tries to shove some explanations in our faces.
Nevertheless, Elephant stands strong as one of the most haunting and strangely beautiful and ugly movies I have ever seen.
What did you guys think?