Product Description

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.

DVD Features:
Featurette:On the Set of Elephant: "Rolling Through Time"
Full Screen Version
TV Spot:HBO Films Spot
Theatrical Trailer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8819 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2004-05-04
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.37:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Dubbed in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 81 minutes

Features

• 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 sur

Amazon.com
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 behavior; 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

From The New Yorker
Gus Van Sant's fascinating, mysterious, semidocumentary meditation on the Columbine massacre is not very satisfying, but it's still something to see. Van Sant and his cameraman, Harris Savides, gently but persistently pad after one student and then another at a nameless school, photographing casual encounters from various points of view. The multiple versions of the same trivial event suggest the utter contingency of disaster: one teen-ager turns in a certain direction and avoids the killers, two others do not. For Van Sant, what matters is the dailiness of school social life-gossip, flirtations, hazing-in which time and sequence count less than states of being. He punctuates the banal school scenes with beautiful shots of scudding clouds and a darkening sky, as if all of eternity were contained in a passing moment when children die. With amateur actors playing the students. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Surreal
Not many people saw this movie in theatres, which is probably a shame; I think the mood of the film would be enhanced by being trapped in your seat the entire time. Gus Van Sant takes advantage of the fact that you already know what his movie is about: a high school shooting. He uses your knowledge to his advantage by playing on the tension you inevitably feel as you wonder, "Will it happen now? Now? Now?" Framing his shots to limit your view, he lets you wonder, all through the movie, what is going on just outside the frame--and eventually forces you to think about how, if many of the kids you're watching would do the same and think about things outside of their own small worlds, the tragic end of the movie might never arrive. But the movie doesn't offer solutions nearly as neat and tidy as that; it simply allows a day to unfold before your eyes, lets you see the world as it's experienced by both the killers and their victims, and shows both how hard it is to see the signs that someone is capable of such a massacre and how easy it might be if people would only pay attention.

And then there's the kiss, which has caused Van Sant no small amount of frustration. Without ruining the tension for those of you who choose to give 80 minutes to this movie, I can tell you that at one point the two killers, about to head for school to act out their plan, get in the shower together--or does one ambush the other? I'm really not sure if the first occupant of the shower knows the second will join him; I don't think we're meant to think that this has happened before. But he walks in, joins his only friend, and says, "Today's the day we're going to die...I never even kissed anyone, did you?" Then the two friends, alienated by the rest of the world, are kissing; the shot lingers long enough to make it clear this is more than a quick kiss goodbye--more like an extended, naked make-out session in the shower.

And then it's over, and the rest of the movie unfolds, including one event, which I'd love to discuss with anyone who sees it, that made me reinterpret the whole friendship between the two killers and their individual reactions to what happens in the shower.

I've made this movie sound like it's filled with action, which isn't fair to those who might consider watching it; much of the 80-minute length of the film is ordinary stuff, like walking down long hallways and playing football and developing film and playing the piano, and much of this plays out without dialogue. I was proud of myself at the end for not speeding up the movie to get down those hallways or get that film developed and clipped; the slight boredom I felt gave my dread an opportunity to build. In the end, this is not an easy film; it won't tell you what you should think about it, and you may not be able to decide on your own what to think, either. I know I haven't. But I'm thinking about it, and that's got to count for something.

Elephant
There is an old Hindu legend about six blind men who come upon an elephant. One thought the elephant like a wall, the second like a spear, the third thought it a snake, number four a tree, five a fan, and six thought the elephant like a rope. They bickered and argued over who was right, when each could only experience the elephant from his own perspective. (click here for the poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant: http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html)

Last night, I viewed Gus Van Sant's 2003 film Elephant. Van Sant is the directory of Good Will Hunting, one of my favorite movies, as well as director of Finding Forrester (for a classic Sean Connery line, go to http://www.yourethemannowdog.com/ and turn the volume up). Elephant is Van Sant's look at a typical high school day from the eyes of a handful of students, except that it is not a typical day. As an attempt at realism, we do not see "real" actors, but rather, real high school students, told to create their own dialogue, and simply allow the camera to follow them.

We open with a car swerving around the neighborhood before abruptly crash stopping in front blond haired John, to the tune of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata in the background. John makes his obviously drunk father hand over the keys and switch to the passenger seat, so that he may drive himself to school. The camera follows John as he walks around school, leaving behind the background sonata that graced our journey to a day of learning. John's travels include stopping to pose for Elias, another student and an amateur photographer, receiving a kiss on the cheek from Acadia during a sad moment, and leaving the building as Alex and Eric are about to enter, carrying heavy bags. We receive an ominous sign with Alex's warning to John, "Get the [heck] out and don't come back! Some heavy [stuff]'s going down!"

Our next guide is Elias, photographing a gothic couple on his walk to school, developing a roll in water in the school's lab, and stopping blond haired John, and requesting he pose for some photographs. We also see football star Nathan leave practice, walk down the hall to the notice of three admiring girls, before meeting up with girlfriend Carrie. They have a lot to talk about, and the camera makes sure we witness. There is Michelle, in sadness walking down the hallway, walking by Nathan before he meets up with Carrie. We meet three girls, noticing Nathan walking towards Carrie, disgusted that he is taken. Through the windows we can see John leaving school and Alex and Eric walking toward the doors. The three girls will have lunch and throw up in the bathroom, Michelle will receive a talking to from a teacher about refusing to wear gym class shorts. We see Eric get picked on, and Alex sit at his piano to break the long musical silence in the film with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Everyone has problems and hurts. Everyone is in emotional flux. We may look upon their problems as petty or small, but to a teenager in transition, small things really can affect one's emotional well-being. If anything, for those who have forgotten, we are reminded that high school is not an easy time.

From the first frame, we can sense that something seems wrong, even in a seemingly ordinary day. The relatively early glimpse of Alex and Eric alerts us to what will transpire. Yet, our anticipation and angst are never met with an explanation before the final scene of violence erupts. No explanation is given. We do not come to an understanding. In naming his film Elephant, Van Sant could be saying that there is no answer, explanation, or solution to horrendous acts such as these. Like in the parable above, each blind man experiences the elephant from his own perspective. We all see things differently. In order to find a cure, first we must have a correct diagnosis to the illness. What is the "illness" that causes troubled youth to engage in acts of school violence? Van Sant throws his hands up. He does not know. All of the characters we meet have problems, so why did these two end up being the ones? Some of the characters we meet die and some do not, yet we do not see a reason why. We are left with the Moonlight Sonota and no closure.

High School as Metaphor for Life:
Elephant was a little too "real" for many tastes. I didn't enjoy the film as I watched it the first time, but thought van Sant did (as always) a terrific job presenting what he wanted to present - if not necessarily my type of movie. The film hasn't left me and the more I think about it - and rewatch it, the better it becomes.

Initially I felt the sense of ennui was a tad overdone watching the back of a student's head as he slowly moves from point A to point B - sometimes for endless minutes on end the camera will not break from that vantage point - the back of a head. The point seemed made both literally and succinctly the first time. Nonetheless, this device frees the narrative and affords van Sant opportunity to move his film in non-linear directions so the glimpse of a face unseen earlier is now viewed in full relief, a snatch of conversation previously heard comes into focus - even if briefly.

There are elements of the film that are touching and keenly observant. While van Sant has typically focused on youth for his body of work, these elements are evident in all ages but noticeably and most strongly pronounced in youth, those hormone filled, confusing years where, completely unbeknownst to us, its victims, life is pretty much going to be the same, and one can change high school for the factory, the hospital, the law firm, the insurance company or wherever you spend your days and those with whom you spend them.

As with life, some characters will stay with you, some you'd wish to know better, others (the three bulimic girlfriends) who natter on endlessly about nothing - and whose existence one forgets entirely - until the next encounter.

There is more than a little heartbreak in Elephant. Watching Alex pelted with spitballs made me cringe with remorse. There is little reason to understand why Alex, and his sort of friend Eric, are losers. There is outwardly no reason they don't fit in, something we see in everyday life: people arbitrarily shunned because as a society we simply need people to be excluded. As the boys share a shower and prepare for the shooting spree - and death - Eric's statement "I've never even kissed anyone" resounds with a loneliness that is shattering.

Had I written this review upon first watching Elephant I would've given it two stars. Seeing it again, and thinking and talking about it lots, earns it 5.