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Elephant

DVD

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Synopsis

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.

Review

Continuing to film with the minimalistic style of Gerry, writer-director Van Sant hauntingly distills the events surrounding a Columbine-like high school shooting to its most basic elements. In taking the time to get to know several sets of interlinked students, the tragedy becomes more profound yet even more senseless. Perhaps echoing the frustration of endless news coverage that demands explanations, however superficial, Van Sant introduces many possible causes and debunks them: deficient parents, peer pressure, drug use, insecurity, sexual issues (gay and straight) — in short, life in a typical high school. The easy availability of guns and violent entertainment may be contributors, but are they triggers, facilitators, or mere conveniences? Much of Elephant is shot from a first-person-shooter video game perspective, but it's hard to imagine a movie so grueling being an inspiration to violence. The identity of the shooters isn't even revealed until halfway through, forcing the audience into a fruitless guessing game, a search for nonexistent answers. These are misunderstood kids, and there's no way an 80-minute movie is going to understand them either. Instead, Van Sant lets us watch, intimately, and maybe experience just a little bit of what it was like for an entire generation to lose its innocence. And that's more than enough.

-- David Gorgos

Product Format Information

DVD : $9.99

Availability: In stock and ready to ship
Running Time: 81 minutes
Close Caption: Yes
Region Code: 1
UPC: 026359222924

Studio : Warner

Languages: English Dolby Digital 5.1 (Primary) , French Dolby Digital Mono , Spanish Dolby Digital Mono , English Subtitles , French Subtitles , Spanish Subtitles
Aspect Ratio: Anamorphic Full-Frame
Features:
Documentaries: On the set of Elephant: Rolling Through Time -- 12 min. documentary
Theatrical trailer

Keywords

High School, Murder, Terrorism, Thriller, Troubled Youth

Genres

Art House/Indie, Drama, Gay/Lesbian

Customer Reviews

A Picture of Life, not Entertainment

Dan P - New York City wrote on 11/27/2004:

Most movies are meant to lead the viewer to a conclusion. They carefully parcel out the information, select the scenes, and edit toward a single point of view. They bring the story to the viewer.

Elephant is not that kind of movie. It brings the viewer to the event. And that's what makes it a difficult movie for some.

Van Sant has no story to tell, only a situation to include us in so we can tell our own story about the tragedy. Putting the viewer in the midst of the students on a single day we experience it first hand, as they did.

The lives being lived in and around this high school are real. There is little clever dialogue, no plot or sub-plot, no explanation. This is the life a typical highschooler lives. It certainly was my experience and that of all my friends. What you get - if you look - is a deeper and truer picture of these kids - if not an understanding - and their everyday experience.

The payoff for this movie is that it makes you know what happened first hand. The frustration, however, is that - like real life - you still don't know why.

But, as I said, it's not an entertainment.

0 (No Stars) Outstanding

Dominic (a_living_dead_boy@hotmail.com) wrote on 10/21/2004:

Unfortunatly, I feel that this film will be lost on so many of those that chose to see it. The structure of this film is such that the meaning is presented in a fashion which accuratly portrays the actual event, and does not attempt to create a typical hollywood feel of simple plot and conclusion. The film techniques are crammed into every corner as well, not just conventional ones, but very obscure shot angles, and use of sequence shots which just helps to portray the entire day as it was. The best thing about this film is that it does not attempt to dramatise the events in any way, it mearly shows them as they came. It really takes the cake for the directing style and for the acting. There is just too much to say to fit in a review, but in short, this film is to go with the greats, its a pioneer in film techniques and idea's. Congratulations to all those who took part in the creation of it.

Anything but ordinary

Timex (shinji582@hotmail.com) wrote on 04/16/2004:

I'm sorry...but watching kids walk down hallways for sometimes what was a 10 minute shot was not a good time. It was painful. The film could have been great had they just showed anything. I enjoyed the characters and the plot, but explain to me how 40 minutes of kids walking down hallways, and doing NOTHING ELSE, makes a watchable film. Oh, and that was the most unordinary high school i have ever seen. Kudos for misrepresenting that. Kids wander hallways and the school grounds, no one has backpacks, class sizes are no bigger than 8 people, and oh yeah, people forgot how to react when you're being shot at. One day I'll make the definitive movie on the subject and it be awesome.