This film went in no particular direction. Don’t get me wrong, it’s shot beautifully (in some scenes at least) and the blocking is excellent, and it was intriguing to watch how the focus was pulled, but I didn’t learn or feel anything. It wasn’t in depth enough to be a character study; it wasn’t complicated or long enough to explain anything about the shooters, and the swastikas and ridiculous ‘video game’ that they played were hackneyed stereotypes that conjure up personal feelings that have nothing to do with the film or the characters. The kids didn’t even know what they were watching. “Who’s that, that one’s Hitler, right?”

Although the “acting” wasn’t as atrocious as it was in Paranoid Park, only one of the characters was interesting at all to me, and that was Elias – who I later found out was quite literally just the actor himself going through his own (mind you, incorrect) development process of 35mm black and white film that he told Gus on set he does as a hobby; even that ‘personal’ touch can’t be attributed to Van Sant. It wasn’t based on a specific true story, so it doesn’t have the nobility or respect of trying to teach us something about what happened in the past or give us insight into true psychosis. It wasn’t written to explore the interactions between high schoolers for more than a 10 or so minute time period. The dialogue is shallow, weak, and repetitive based on what calm, gentile, happy, middle-American people and the media would come up with while trying to discuss “what would a troubled kid sound like” … “ooh he’d be detached and have fun shooting people because of evil videogames.”

Watching footage from production, the kids run around joking and Van Sant simply emotionally explores the set while longingly smiling at the children. That’s what this film is about, how Gus Van Sant feels about violence in America 6 years ago. Nothing more and nothing less. According to the synopsis it is supposed to be about an area of privilege, and yet no indicators (aside from a drunk father who is not at some occupation/work) make their way onto the screen. We don’t learn enough about the killers to sympathize with them (since Van Sant hides behind minimalism so that we think he’s making an artistic statement, when in fact he has no understanding of violence and the ‘motivation’ or causes behind it) and we don’t know little enough to despise them. It seems as if he wanted to show a couple kids that may or may not represent a few different cliques in high school, but the only way we would care as an audience or not dare to criticize the filmmaking is by using the taboo subject at the time, school shootings. Anyone that didn’t like it right off the bad would be a horrible person. Let’s throw the Palm d’Or at it to prove that we stand against violence.

If you want to see a film about a school shooting, watch POLYTECHNIQUE. When screened in Cannes this year, the entire theater (in the Palais Stéphanie) instantly fell silent, was gripped during the entire 76 minute film, and gave a standing ovation at the end. The actors and the directors were crying and many members of the audience had tears and makeup running down their cheeks. Not only is the film based on a true event (that occurred in 1989), but we learn more about not only the perpetrator but also several students during the incident, as well as afterwards. We see much more of the gut-wrenching, believable, and unexpected violence instead of one or two squibs strapped to the back of a cute teenager – as is the case with Elephant. The true story of Polytechnique continues after the first have of the film to follow those whose lives were effected permanently after the shootings and explores how different people deal with tragedy. Elephant ends with an unconvincing trucking-out shot of the “popular kids” not even begging put politely asking for “the shooter” to not “do it” and stating unenthusiastically, “you’re sick.” One of my classmates committed (and was convicted of) teenage gun violence, so my community has had to deal with such tragedies first-hand.

Elephant is a self-righteous and distanced trek through an imaginary and optimistic stereotypical view of an unjustifiably large high school with far too few characters or scenes that bring any new knowledge or interest, especially now that school shootings are not the focus of our fear-based and fact-eluding media, as they were at the turn of the century when Elephant was released.