Gus Van Sant makes an ordinary school day painfully absorbing in Elephant. We recommend its patient attention to the pupils, though its portrayal of the perpetrators sometimes feels too thin to justify the scrutiny.
Gus Van Sant’s Elephant is a disturbing school drama that we recommend, with reservations about the attention it gives the perpetrators. It takes an ordinary day seriously enough to spend much of its 81 minutes watching pupils move through it. The prospect of a shooting makes that patience difficult to bear, but Van Sant does not hurry towards the violence. He wants us to spend time with the teenagers before we start asking what their lives might explain.
Harris Savides’s cinematography gives those walks time to become uncomfortable. The long travelling shots keep us alongside the students when a more impatient film would already be cutting to the next incident. We felt sick with apprehension watching them make their way through school, because the camera allows their movements to remain so ordinary when we know the subject of the film. Nothing in those passages needs to announce danger for us to start looking for it.
Van Sant also edits, returning to encounters from different viewpoints so that the same stretch of the day can belong to more than one pupil. These returns make us pay attention to people we might have treated as background on the first pass. We begin to recognise the overlap between their routines, and the school becomes easier to follow without an explanatory tour. Occasionally the repetition feels over-arranged, but it mostly gives the students time that a brisker account would have denied them.
John Robinson plays John McFarland, Elias McConnell plays Elias and Kristen Hicks plays Michelle, among a cast whom Van Sant allows considerable room. The improvised exchanges have the hesitations of people who have not prepared a useful speech for the audience. Some also have the stiffness of a scene that has not quite found its rhythm. We can forgive that here: the unevenness helps the pupils seem separate from the director’s purpose. Their ordinary company is the part of the film we most wanted to keep watching.
The portrayal of the perpetrators is harder to accept. Van Sant gives them a blankness that can be frightening, yet sustained attention to that blankness tells us little more about them. Refusing a neat cause for the shooting is sensible; the film would be dishonest if it pretended one conversation could settle the matter. But this section asks us to look closely without always giving us enough to look at. The boys become less particular than the pupils whose ordinary routines have occupied so much of the film.
Elephant gives the pupils something crime dramas can be too quick to take away: time in which nothing needs to happen. The walks and improvised exchanges hold our attention because the pupils are allowed to be preoccupied with their own day. That is a substantial achievement, despite the scenes in which Van Sant’s reserve becomes frustrating. We recommend it to anyone prepared for a school drama that allows little relief from the knowledge of what it depicts. Leave it for another evening if what you need is reassurance.
