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In Our Own Backyards
ELEPHANT
A steely docu-drama recreates a modern horror.
Written and directed by Gus Van Sant
GUS VAN SANT is a filmmaker who tries one's patience. In his splendid Drugstore Cowboy, Van Sant explored drug addiction and its criminal element with nihilistic humor. But then came My Own Private Idaho, his sluggish neo-Shakespearean riff set among teen-age drifters, followed by the overrated To Die For.
In Good Will Hunting, Van Sant went beefcake commercial, and psychiatry saved the day. He parlayed the success of that movie into his pointless, shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. And last year there was Gerry, a deliberate and haunting (if somewhat impenetrable) story of two young men, neither of them named Gerry - although that's what they call each other - who get dangerously lost on a desert walkabout.
All of this is germane to Elephant, Van Sant's most difficult, controversial and frustrating movie yet. Shot in Portland, Ore., where he lives, it follows a day in the life of a Typical American High School that ends when two buddies shoot the place up with guns they bought on the internet.
Movies don't get much more timely than this, although Van Sant certainly doesn't exploit his subject matter: Filmed like a docu-drama, with flares of artistry that you won't even recognize at first, Elephant attempts to steal glimpses and sensations of an inexplicable cultural phenomenon.
Van Sant does that exceptionally for half of his film's lean 80 minutes, introducing us to his characters with a series of casual moments in their lives: John (John Robinson), a sinewy, good-natured kid who forces his drunk dad (Timothy Bottoms) to hand over the keys after they swerve down a tree-lined suburban street; Eli (Elias McConnell), a friendly, lanky photographer who's building his portfolio with shots of his classmates; Nathan and Carrie (Nathan Tyson, Carrie Finklea), the shaggy-haired stud pup and his watchful girlfriend; Acadia (Alicia Miles), a member of the school's gay-straight alliance; Michelle (Kristen Hicks), the lonely girl with frizzy hair and glasses.
Which one of these middle-class nobodies will die when the killing begins? Which ones will turn out to be killers? Van Sant tells us before too long. In the cafeteria, Alex (Alex Frost), cherubically handsome and dark-haired, takes notes on his surroundings and tells an inquisitive girl that it's for "my plan." Later, in his bedroom, he plays Beethoven beautifully on the piano while his friend Eric (Eric Deulen), gangly and bleached blond, plays a shoot-'em-up video game on a laptop and surfs weapons websites.
These are the killers: Alex and Eric, one a gifted artist (Alex also draws), the other a hanger-on (he spends more time at Alex's cozy home than his own, which we never see). They plan their assault with impassive precision, deciding where the havoc-wreaking firebombs will go, and who will stalk which hallway when the shooting begins. They want to be especially sure to get the jocks. But while they're up to serious business, Alex ends their final planning session with: "Most importantly, have fun, man."
The first half of Elephant feels tensely authentic and icily detached as Van Sant's camera drifts from teen to teen, sometimes stalking them silently for three or four minutes as they peregrinate about the campus. It's an absorbing dramatic choice by Van Sant, for it allows us to get close to these kids by literally following in their footsteps. He even moves almost invisibly back and forth in time, another testament to his adroit direction and storytelling.
During his drama's climactic passage - at times cogently realistic, at other times eerily apocalyptic - we can only assume that Van Sant borrows his more anomalous details from the headlines just as thoroughly as he borrows his scenario. With the shooting about to begin, why would John, whom the killers warn not to enter the building, circumnavigate the school grounds telling people, "Don't go in there," instead of immediately asking for a cell phone and calling the police? Why would Benny (Bennie Dixon), the only black student we see (and only for one short scene), choose to walk the halls coolly during the killing rather than escaping through a window (which he helps a petrified girl to do)? Are these reckless choices by Van Sant, or are they simply two inscrutable vignettes that attempt to document the unknowable?
Van Sant never tries to settle on the deeper causes behind Eric and Alex's carnage. He only offers one canned suggestion, when Eric tells the principal before killing him: "You know there are others like me out there, and they will kill you if you fuck with them like you did with me and Gerry." But Van Sant seems to have written this line to edify (satisfy?) his movie's audience, and by having Eric refer to Alex as "Gerry," he indulges himself even further with an arcane self-reference to his earlier film.
He stumbles again just before the shootings, when the two killers shower together in Alex's home. "I've never even kissed anybody, have you?" says Eric, after he steps inside the small shower stall with Alex. And then the two embrace and kiss at length in what can only be described as a make-out session under a stream of hot water. What could Van Sant have been thinking with this inchoate homoerotic flourish? And if that's what he was thinking - well, it feels too indulgent just to throw something like that out, unless he anticipates an audience of heady art-film viewers who will make the compassionate connections (now I'm being very generous).
In real life, of course, we do know something about high-school killers' lives, so we can at least try to do the math. In Elephant, we know little of any use, so its slice of life inevitably leaves you hungry and salivating. That may be Van Sant's point. It's also a good way to invite viewers to make fools of themselves trying to figure it out. Nor does he explain his title, although Eric's comment to his principal suggests that tormented teens, like elephants, will never forget.
Van Sant scores Elephant with sad Beethoven pieces, like "Für Elise" and the "Moonlight" sonata. This is certainly a reference to Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, where Alex, the leader of a gang of young marauders, worshiped Ludwig Van. In an even odder twist, the pianist/killer in Elephant is also named Alex - that is, both the character and the actor, because Van Sant hired non-professionals to play these kids and had most of them keep their real first names in the movie.
Did he cast Alex Frost because of his Christian name? Did the Clockwork Orange connection occur to him after casting, and so he chose Beethoven music to underscore it? Or is it all simply a divine artistic coincidence? Sitting in the theater, we don't have the luxury of asking him, nor should we. For this is Gus Van Sant: fascinating, maddening, quirky - and, as always, just slightly unable to give his art over to itself.
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The Boys Next Door
ZERO DAY
Another filmmaker attemps to parse the inexplicable.
With Andre Keuck, Calvin Robertson
Written Ben Coccio and Chris Coccio
Directed by Ben Coccio
ANDRE KRIEGMAN AND CAL GABRIEL don't fit the profile.
They're bright kids who share a benign sardonic wit, and when they talk to Andre's video camera, an 18th birthday gift from his slightly existential father - "Who needs Prozac when I got you, Dad?" quips Andre, the rhetorician of the pair (his mother laughs) - they seem like they're making the kind of home-movie diary common among kids in this age of instant imaging.
Naturally, they hate their stupid high school, and they have a nemesis: Brad Huff, the wrestling stud who drinks, drives and does drugs but never loses his license. So on a warm July night, Cal and Andre pelt Brad's home with rotten eggs. It is, they tell their video camera, their first "act of war."
They aren't just talking trash. For during this summer, the "Army of Two" plans an armed assault on their high school, which the school's security cameras will capture in grainy black and white. And because they leave their own videotapes behind in a bank strongbox, we see their plans unfold in Blair Witch fashion, minus the supernatural horrors.
Ben Coccio's Zero Day, like Gus Van's Sant's Elephant before it, coolly reconstructs (and passively deconstructs) an ineffable recent phenomenon of very few young lives. Both movies star non-professionals actors, both look like documentaries, and both conclude that the kids who ultimately kill people are the ones whose lives got messed with by their peers.
Coccio's film is less complicated than Van Sant's artier effort, and that's partly why Zero Day is both more and less effective. Its untrained performers are wonderfully authentic, and its flawless climax is difficult to watch. But Coccio has contrived his characters to be impenetrable, and while Andre and Cal should terrify us as they merrily plan their adventure - they're very astute about everything in a self-consciously post-modern way - you have to work hard to believe that these implausibly affable kids would be the ones in their high school to do it.
Zero Day becomes slightly harder to swallow because Coccio gives the boys such metaphoric fictional surnames (blond-haired Cal is the more angelic participant; Krieg is German for war). He also cast the real parents of his nascent stars, Andre Keuck and Calvin Robertson, to play Andre Kriegman's and Cal Gabriel's parents, so obviously these young men come from close suburban Connecticut families. (Maybe G.I. George can fund a program for families to make low-budget films together.)
With as easy as it is to get guns in America, and with as many guns as there are to get, why do events like this happen so infrequently? Because, I think, most teen-agers like Coccio's and Van Sant's fuck up their own lives rather than ending the lives of others (Cal takes part in "Zero Day" so his death will have meaning). And yet, our culture is fascinated enough by this rarity for two filmmakers to spend their time speculating on its causes - and coming up with interesting movies that hardly elucidate a thing.
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What's This I See Before Me?
AMERICAN
GUN
In three American towns, they got themselves a gun.
With Marcia Gay Harden, Forest Whitaker, Donald Sutherland
Written and directed by Aric Avelino
A few years ago, in Elephant, Gus Van Sant told an arty, fictionalized account of the Columbine shootings that did more than just not look for answers. It positively frustrated you with how it didn't.
That's become the modus operandi for movies about high school gun violence: Be at once recondite and transparent to make people ponder the opaque clarity of it all. Why does it happen, how does it happen, how can it happen? When the "good kid" does it, the answer is always "we just didn't see it coming." And when it's the moody, alienated, troubled kid, the answer is "how could we not have known."
Aric Avelino's American Gun bathes in well-intended melancholy, from the furtive words of its opening voice - the mother of a teen-ager who shot up his high school - to the plaintive piano music that stalks its characters, in three cities, as it tells thematically interwoven stories about guns and the aftermath of using them. The cast, too, sets you up to expect something serious: We know these good actors from theater, TV and Oscar night, and they obviously came together to make this little movie by a first-time director because they believed in it.
In suburban Oregon: It's the three-year anniversary of the day a good kid took a gun to school and killed some of his classmates. The shooter's single mother (Marcia Gay Harden) accepts money and gives a tabloid-TV interview that makes her look responsible for what happened. She loses her job, and her surviving son has to leave his expensive private school. The troubled policeman (Tony Goldwyn) who couldn't save kids during the shooting, and who's been repressing his remorse, sees the program and angrily calls the TV station.
In Chicago: A dedicated principal (Forest Whitaker) in a mostly black urban school helps kids work through their problems. "It doesn't make things go away," he tells a kid who brings a gun to school. "It does what you saw." A high-achieving student, one of the principal's favorites, hangs out with a buddy after school, talking about country music and how the brain works. He also has a gun, which he needs to protect himself at his night job.
At the University of Virginia: A college undergrad (Linda Cardellini), bored with school and with her part-time job in the gun shop owned by her grandfather (Donald Sutherland), saves a drunken friend from rape at a party. She gets some scars herself when she intervenes, and soon she goes shopping for a gun.
The actors seize these meaty roles and chew on them well, especially Harden, who has some searing moments with her son (promising newcomer Chris Marquette). Avelino tells his story concisely, in 95 minutes, with ancillary themes and ideas winnowing through it all. But finally, American Gun is about the phenomenal, not the inexplicable: We see the danger everywhere, and we go on like it will simply fix itself. How can we think it's okay to sell liquor late at night in a crime-addled city neighborhood and hire a high school kid to do it? Avelino builds his drama nicely, from the thoroughly transparent to the interestingly lucid, almost daring us to say that we still don't know what's wrong.
An ending is always the most difficult part for any writer, especially with difficult material, and when a dramatist tells three stories at once, he gives himself room to draw three conclusions without seeming to equivocate. Despite an inevitable, predictable and wholly unnecessary random act of climactic violence, American Gun finally feels like a moment-of-truth TV drama, where the characters settle upon a clarity that calms them down or offers them some release, even if it doesn't solve very much.
For mother and son, it's the realization that they both feel "tired." For granddad and the college student, she confesses that the gun shop has always felt "weird" to her. And for the principal, Avelino invents his finest set piece, a moment both literal and symbolic: On the ceiling tiles of his office, a stain reoccurs, but rather than finding the cause, the principal just moves tiles around to cover it up. You can equate the stain with blood if you like, but it doesn't matter. The point is that we can't just look at something obvious and then think we've fixed it by putting it out of sight. For that distillation alone, American Gun is worth the time.