Elephant: A Film By Gus Van Sant
by Gus Van Sant
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DVD details
Actor: Alex Frost, Elias Mcconnell, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Jordan TaylorDirector: Gus Van Sant
Brand: FROST,ALEX
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.37:1
Running Time: 81 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-05-04
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Model: 92229
Studio: Hbo Home Video
Product features:
- Winner of the Palme d'Or and Best Director prizes at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Gus Van Sant's (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) Elephant takes us inside an American high school on one, single ordinary day that very rapidly turns tragic. Elephant demonstrates that high school life is a complex landscape where the vitality and beauty of young lives can shift from light to darkness with sur
DVD Reviews of Elephant: A Film By Gus Van Sant
DVD Review: Monster Factory
Summary: 5 Stars
Take my hand. Let's talk in whispers.
Why? Because it's study hall, that's why---you know, with that [naughty word, rhymes with hitch] of a librarian who is already staring us down with her double-ot cobalt-blue stink-eye, and, well, because yes, I have a Mauser in my pants but yes, I'm also Happy to See You.
Oh, and because what I'm about to say might shock you. You might scream, and that might start people running, and you know it's really hard to get a dead-aim on a moving target, no matter how easy it looks in the movies or when you're playing DOOM3 on your hopped-up godware system your folks plunked down 6K for over Christmas-break (damn, I meant to say 'Winter Holiday', guess that's another 180 demerits for me).
But first---"Elephant": Gus Van Sant's sly, sneaky little exegesis on the 1999 Columbine Massacre, is a masterpiece of cinematic understatement, and a first stab at answering the question no one dares ask: what do you get when you pack 13-year old children, hormones ablaze, into a concrete box for four years, at the very instant where their center of influence is shifting from teacher & parent to peers---and then expect them to Learn?
Let's talk about High School. Four years where every single thing is both achingly important and relentlessly trivial. Four years where Social Darwinism is flipped off, where Evolutionary Gravity is reversed, and where those least able to make it after the Looking Glass that is High School lord it over everyone else.
Face it: isn't that why High School reunions are such a deep well of nervous tension and gloating revenge? The supreme reversal of fortune, where the big guns are loaded up by the Survivors, where the class nerd rides back into town in a Rolls and the Jocks---good enough to rule their backwater gridirons, but not disciplined enough for the pro-leagues---are losing their hair and hawking insurance & used cars.
That's what Gus Van Sant does in "Elephant", in which Van Sant deploys his camera as a kind of unobtrusive probe before the infamously opaque surface of a High School in its last serene minutes before Apocalypse. Van Sant wields his camera with a kind of spare, fluid, long-tracking elegance, using it as an instrument to pick a target and stay by his side, slipping back, or ahead, physically & temporally, using the camera as recording-device and scalpel and heightening both the banality and the creeping, mounting sense of malevolence and doom.
It's an approach Richard Linklater used in "Slackers", and here it works doubly well: Van Sant's approach plunges madly along like a latter-day Rashomon, air-dropping the viewer into the field alongside characters we know only from a snippet of their actions, as they move through their cloistered environment, through sleek, gleaming, otherworldly hallways of their high school, in the instants before carnage and madness.
American Higher Education may not produce scholars---hell, it chiefly rolls out illiterates---but along the way it does succeed at one thing: turning out Monsters. And why? Gus Van Sant doesn't get involved in that polemic---his camera is far too voyeuristic, to its credit, not intrusive, present merely to record---but I'll venture a guess: it's about that glorious little extra of our educational system called "Socialization". You know, the thing you're missing out on if you're home-schooled.
I mean, c'mon---didn't you ever wonder why Dylan & Eric set off firebombs in the Cafeteria? I mean, by Odin's Flaming Nuggets, why the Cafeteria, of all the banal, innocent, wall-eyed places in the school? Why not napalm Detention, or the office of the Dean of Students, or the Pre-Calc Study Hall, surely all of them far better oubliettes of silent adolescent agony than the poor ol' Cafeteria, yes?
No. No, I think not. You know why? Because the Cafeteria was, to the outcasts, to the pariah, to the Leper, and to the Royalty, the place where Court was held, where the All-Important Question was endlessly debated, reviewed, decided: Are you In? or Are you Out?
Like Versailles in France, or the Tuilleries: where cliques formed, where the Nobility doled out its scant awards and ample scourges, Sheep on the Right, Goats on the Left. And God help you if you were a Goat.
Follow me?
Loosen up: why do you think Marat and Danton and Robespierre and his pack of Jacobins, Red in Tooth and Claw, tore through the palaces and the courts and the bastions of privilege---even unto the Church vestries!---with pitchfork and saber and torch? Because, Children, that was where the Royalty had its place, and where they---and their uncouth brothers and sisters of the People, could be kept out, walled off, pushed down.
So they set fire to the Cafeteria. Call it a Revolution, in miniature, a little thinking globally, acting *way* locally, if you dig. Taking the Power Back.
So back to Gus Van Sant: "Elephant" works because it keeps its distance. It stays back, it studies, it regards, and like any surgical instrument it can sometimes even strip away skin and flesh and muscle and tissue and bone, laying bare that which is caulked and covered up beneath the surface of pom-poms and gridiron warlords.
I think our little conversation is done, and study hall is about to let out. I'm going to give you 20 seconds: on one side of that glass door is your vast, unbounded future---well, that is, until life gets complicated, until Evolutionary Gravity re-asserts itself, you get knocked up, dragged down, shoved into a cubicle and forced to work nights---and on this side of the table, with Thee & Me, you're looking into a full metal jacket: shark eye, black widow venom, the Eternal Sleep.
I'd run.
JSG
Description of Elephant: A Film By Gus Van Sant
Winner of the Palme d'Or and Best Director prizes at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Gus Van Sant's (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) Elephant takes us inside an American high school on one, single ordinary day that very rapidly turns tragic. Elephant demonstrates that high school life is a complex landscape where the vitality and beauty of young lives can shift from light to darkness with surreal speed. It's an ordinary high school day. Except that it's not.DVD Features:
Featurette:On the Set of Elephant: "Rolling Through Time"
Full Screen Version
TV Spot:HBO Films Spot
Theatrical Trailer
Elephant, the elegant and unsettling movie from Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting), depicts students at a high school before and during a harrowing, Columbine-style shooting. The movie follows one young boy who takes over the wheel from his drunken dad while returning from lunch, then loops back in time and follows another student who crosses paths with the first, then loops back and follows another--all captured in long, unedited tracking shots that are serene and unhurried, even when two boys in camouflage gear, carrying heavy bags, arrive at the school and begin shooting. Elephant doesn't attempt to explain their behavior; it simply places the audience back in the brief yet interminable window of adolescence, when life is trivial and painfully important at the same time. Your reaction to Elephant will depend as much on your life experiences as anything in the movie itself. --Bret Fetzer
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