Cold-blooded
Relentlessly somber, with the eruptions of teen violence rendered in a hushed style, Gus Van Sant's Elephant—his response to the Columbine shootings—is an art-house version of an exploitation picture. It's very skillfully made, with warm cinematography by Harris Savides that provides a visual and tonal counterpoint to the affectless interactions of the adolescent characters, and with a restless camera that roams the halls of a monstrous glass-and-concrete high school.
The camerawork, which tracks one kid after another in a way that's meant to seem as random as the shootings, recalls High School, the classic 1969 documentary by Frederick Wiseman about life in a big, impersonal school. But Van Sant's approach is the opposite of Wiseman's: he lays out everything with fiendish deliberation.
Van Sant piles up impressions of each of the kids, knowing that we know what the movie is about. Will the killer be John (John McFarland), the towheaded boy with the kewpie-doll face who's late to school because he has to take care of his drunken father? Or Michelle (Kristen Hicks), who won't wear shorts to gym class and who maintains a tense inward focus as she changes clothes in the locker room without letting anyone see her body?
