BLEAK WEEK: ELEPHANT

Gus Van Sant’s Palme D’or winning ELEPHANT chronicles a single day at a typical American high school in Portland, Oregon. What begins as an ordinary school day quickly turns into tragedy, as two suburban teenage boys go on a shooting rampage through their school. Van Sant’s controversial cinematic experiment not only addresses the distinctly American phenomenon of mass shooting, but also confronts the hauntingly mundane side of such forms of senseless violence and evil.

“Few American filmmakers have reinvented themselves as consistently or successfully as Gus Van Sant, whose shape-shifting skill set over an almost 40-year career has kept viewers impressed and guessing. After the mainstream success of GOOD WILL HUNTING — and the equally high-profile debacle of his shot-for-shot PSYCHOremake — Van Sant started styling himself as an austere long-take specialist à la European grandmasters like Béla Tarr, ramping up camera movement even as he slowed the pace of his scenes down to a deliberate crawl. This half-entrancing, half-alienating aesthetic was perfected in ELEPHANT, a strategic re-creation of the Columbine shootings that split the difference between naturalism, myth, and horror-movie exploitation; the tracking shots through high school hallways before, during, and in the aftermath of a massacre evoked the menace of HALLOWEEN. Viewed now, ELEPHANT can’t help but play as a product of its time (i.e., the casting of THAT'S MY BUSH! star Timothy Bottoms as a drunk dad in an ominously funny prologue), but it remains one of the most unsettlingly accomplished American movies of the new millennium, and exactly as difficult to categorize or definitively interpret as its maker intended.“ - Adam Nayman, The Ringer