Reviewed by David Levinson

LIKE MOST, thanks to the monolithic drive of word-of-mouth, I went in with the bomb having already been dropped – knowing that the big, fat elephant-in-the-room was a shoot-up at a high school in Portland, Oregon. I'd be lying then if I said I wasn't curious about how Van Sant would pull it off, anticipating the bloody climax with stomach-churning fascination.


And then, after 60 odd minutes, it finally comes. Violence doesn't so much explode as implode, seeping through the sound-vacuumed hallways of Americana. And with the cogs firmly set in motion, the promise of cathartic release becomes awash in a spectacle of the bathetic, echoing the derailed Für Elise climax – Alex turns his fire on Eric for the hell of it; Benny is introduced and then cut down before he can fulfill his martyr-like intimations; aside from Michelle, the deaths of principle characters are abstracted through last-minute cut-aways...

I left feeling shaken, but also somewhat emptied out. Like pieces were missing. It was the common mistake of ultimately trying to fetishize grand tragedy – examining the reasoning, shedding a tear, closing the case; all with a greater sense of well being due to the fact that I'm an empathetic human being.

And yet, if anything, Elephant isn't bent on trafficking in pat theories as to why or why not Columbine may have happened (the real-world analogy of which becomes inescapable, following its active deflation of the Nazi-fixation and video game violence media myths). Instead, in its unyielding suppression of motivation, the tragedy is framed as something inevitable, signaled by an early shot of the two killers entering the school bound up in camouflage gear. The only way to make sense of anything would be to roll back the clock – to examine what preceded the death march.

The first movement unfolds almost like a daydream. With Gus unloading the baggage he picked up from his Bela Tarr soiree, the movie flitters between a collection of characters, each flowering with an endless sense of possibility. It's high school as a living, breathing dynamic, rippling with an array of emotional wavelengths, yet formed on a constellation of perceptively ordinary details. Dealing from a deck composed almost entirely of 'ready-mades' – the jock and his princess, the tormented geek, the pretty bulimic girls, etc. – Gus literally encases us within their viewpoint; tracking them for sustained chunks of real-time, with shallow focus reducing their surroundings to a haze. Characters' paths intersect, and the film momentarily grinds into slow motion, straining to let go under the aching realisation that each connection made is a step closer to tragedy. And as they each navigate their sterile landscape with a vérité of time and space, identity is something that's thrown into a state of flux, with the hope of achieving any kind of stability becoming hinged on boxing out others.

Yet in the process of this primitive self-definition, they themselves are made opaque to us – bristling with a kind of static, where they telegraph enough information to break their John Hughes shackles, but not enough for us to get any kind of reading on them. Hence, it's just the "breaking down of Columbine's easy-answer logistics" rerouted directly into everyday life, culminating into the film's raison d'être: a tightly-framed, arcing pan across the faces of students in a gay-straight alliance meeting, arguing over whether or not it's possible to tell that someone is gay just by looking at them.

In a case like this, charges of style over substance will be unavoidable. But it's about the limitations of individual perspective, and how we didn't see Columbine coming because no one really wanted to. And, in my mind, that's saying more than enough.