Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4652 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-07-26
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English, German
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 80 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
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 behaviour; 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

Special Features

• Rare interview with Gus van Sant
  
• From Elephant to Elephant - comparison of the two films
  
• In School With Elephant
  
• Trailers

Synopsis
Gus Van Sant's drifty, eloquent, and effortlessly poignant ELEPHANT is loosely based on the massacre at Columbine High School. (On April 20, 1999 in Littleton, Colorado two 17-year-old boys fired semi-automatic weapons on their high school classmates, killing 13, injuring 25, and then taking their own lives.) Van Sant's film is set in Portland, Oregon and uses non-actors chosen from an open casting call of high school students. On a crisp, sunny Autumn day, with colourful leaves on the trees and puffy clouds drifting across blue skies, students arrive at school as usual. Eli takes photographs for his portfolio, John manages problems with his alcoholic father, Acadia attends a gay-lesbian meeting, Nate plays a game of tag football, and Michelle works in the library. Meanwhile, two outsiders, Eric and Alex, harbour hatred for their peers. Each of ELEPHANT's students have unique interests and personalities, and the film respectfully emphasises their individuality. It also demonstrates how school is an unpredictable blender where students' differences are constantly agitated. Harris Savides' excellent photography--shot in 1:33 aspect ratio, making the movie a cube in the centre of the screen--follows and floats, sometimes blurring and juxtaposing the light to achieve an ethereal mood; while Leslie Shatz's ambient sound design and a soundtrack of soft Beethoven piano music completes that feeling. The film is structured in brief overlapping chapters all taking place on the morning of the 11:35 A.M. attack.
ELEPHANT won the Palme D'Or and Best Director at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.

Customer Reviews

worth watching? perhaps..
I'll hand it to this film for covering a daring subject as this. I think it is a clever concept in theory, but but in practise it simply falls short of success. The film intentionally gives you a voyeuristic view of high school students and the mundane interactions of a typical high school day, without ever letting you get too close to them as individuals. Whilst this is intentional, I felt that it prevented me from ever becoming emmersed in the film, and feeling any connection or empathy for the students whatsoever.

If you are reading this review, chances are you already have a pretty good idea that a terrible tradegy puts an end to this dreary school day. Well I did aswell, and thus spent the whole film just waiting for it to happen. They clearly try to make a powerful statement by following these kids lives avidly, only to have them picked off like rabbits, although I knew it was going to happen, so didnt really feel any sense of loss when it did. I was satisfied in a way, since I'd been waiting so damn long for it to happen.

It is shot in the style of a documentary, with no fancy camera work. This is supposed to imply the reality of the high school situation and also the fact that the event is based on a real one. Granted it is shot in a way that is about as real as it can possibly be... Although you know its not actually real, it's a made up film, and personally, I couldn't get past that.

The background story of the killers is a bit flaky and pointless in my opinion. In the featured interview with the director, he points out that nobody actually knows what droves the boys to such an act so they make one up themselves. Fair enough, but it just seems like another way that this film doesn't really work.

I think the problem with this film is that with its humdrum cinematic techniques, it simply fails to create any sort of connection between the characters and the viewers. Their personalities remain too opaque. Whilst this may have been intentional and more realistic, was the point of the film not to evoke some sort of emotive response? A film of such dark subject matter could have had a much more powerful effect in my opinion, and even if this detracted from the realistic style it was going for, it probably would have been worth it as it would have gotten the point across much better.

When i heard about this film i thought it seemed like an intersting and exiting concept. However after watching it i think that this was not really a good method to portray something like this. For a problem that is rooted in such dark and deep seeded problems, telling the story with a load of one dimensional characters seems entirely innaproppriate really.

Its not a bad film, and it possible that the concept was simply lost on me. However I took it out of the DVD player feeling confused, dissatisfied and wondering what the point in the film was. It didn't show me anything i didnt already know, and i don't really think anything useful comes from it at all.

But if you're thinking of trying it out, go ahead, who knows, it may be the best film you've ever seen.

The elephant in the room
Sometimes its worth looking at a film like this and examining whether it was showered with acclaim because its actually any good or because it's a fashionable subject. In the case of Elephant the praise was completely justified as this is a movie that succeeds in everything it sets out to do.

Elephant is an odd little film that sets out to juxtapose the ordinariness of the daily situation with the extremity of its outcome. To that end the cast was set during a casting call for local high school students in director Gus Van Sant's hometown. The resulting cast were largely not (at the time) professional actors and the roles they would play were in many cases moulded by the teenagers themselves. As Van Sant explains in an interview extra the characters are also teen movie archetypes to an extent and this serves to make the school that acts as the setting seem familiar. At just under 80 minutes long the film chronicles the final hour in the day of the characters leading up to an event that will (without wanting to make it too melodramatic) shatter their lives. In that hour the lives of the characters intersect, however briefly, and this is mixed in with parts of the 24 hours previously for two of their number.

Essentially Elephant is a fictionalised rendering of a High School shooting spree, heavily influenced by the infamous Columbine Massacre. To that end it is set as an ordinary school day until the first shot is fired. Long, dialogue free, stretches abound as characters move from one place to the next. Some of the characters are likeable, others are not so likeable, its clear though that they are teenagers and none deserve to die. Van Sant makes no effort to lay blame for this kind of event. When Alex, the mastermind of the shooting, begins to work his masterplan it could be for any number of reasons. He is being bullied, he may not be entirely sane, he is an outsider whose only real friend is not on his level, he is a latch key kid, he plays violent video games, guns are easy to come by. Any one or all of these may be ultimately the cause of the violence and death that make up the last 20 minutes or so of the movie. Its not movie violence either- there's no heavy metal soundtrack or pithy one liners, and there's no dramatic poses or improbable physicality. Only a palpable feeling of terror and a lack of apprehension.

Films like Elephant are necessarily rare. We watch movies to escape, not to have to face up to grim realities. Films like Elephant are also necessary. In this movie Van Sant isn't apportioning blame or providing easy answers. He's not trying to tell us the answers, only to make us face up to the harsh reality of the questions. The elephant in the room here is how a society can allow its children to massacre each other no matter what the cause. Highly recommended.

It stays with you
I saw this movie in an Arts Cinema in Chelsea a few years ago and still think about it. I loved the fact that it doesn't rush but follows each person for a period of time using the moments and places, viewed from different perspectives to show the time frame of the movie.

I felt that one of it's strong points is the fact it doesn't over analyse the minds of the killers. We've all seen computer games where the view on screen is a castle/cave/dungeon or whatever and the weapon is at the bottom of the screen while the 'hero' goes around killing everything in sight...well, maybe that was all the influence & reason they needed. Who knows. Maybe they didn't like Mondays either.

If you're after reasons, analysis, blood, gore & guts, dramatics and special effects avoid this one but if you're after an incredible and thought provoking movie I can't recommend it high enough