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ELEPHANT (USA/HBO Films/Fine Line Features) is Gus Van Sant’s strangely non-committal meditation on a high school shooting spree, which closely resembles the Columbine Massacre. This is highly unusual for a made-for-television film, which would usually provide a set of likeable student-victim characters for the audience to mourn. Our expectation is for a tabloid-style expose to give us the inside story of these young assassins and their fatal plot to amass automatic weapons and, blithely, take them to school as a perverse special-interest exhibit.
Mr. Van Sant is, of course, a master at withholding what we want to know. To call this winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or disappointing is a massive understatement, though the film does have its partisans who excuse its being affectless or plain hollow. I would characterize ELEPHANT as intentionally negligible piffle. This may well be Van Sant’s take on the Banality of Evil — the truly murderous feelings that underlie the bullying and courting rituals of tedious high school interchange. But it fails to address our curiosity as to why two high school students, on the brink of life, could slaughter their fellow-students and take their own, young lives.
ELEPHANT tells us little or nothing about the shooters. The original, explicatory script was scrapped, in favor of the improvised banalities of speech by the young, vapid “pretties” whom Van Sant has chosen as his high school dullards. These kids prove so boring, we feel nothing but indifference to their casual, largely off-screen execution. (Van Sant is so fastidiously tasteful about the bloodshed, he qualifies for any censorship board’s beatification.)
I’ve got hot news for Mr. Van Sant — jettisoning the explication of the deed and failing to create a single character of interest to elicit our compassion is a profound failure. Everyone thought that after the string of rotten, recent Van Sant films — like the frame-for-frame remake of PSYCHO or the replication of GOOD WILL HUNTING in FINDING FORRESTER — that Mr. Van Sant had finally righted himself. But I fail to see ELEPHANT as any kind of jump start for his wan, perverse talent. If you look back at his oeuvre, Van Sant’s disasters, like EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES, prove just as quirky and peculiar as his early, and moderately successful, art film, MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO.
Van Sant is clearly an odd creature. At the press conference, I asked him to explain the significance of the repeated trailing shots of his students’ trudging through endless, linoleum-tiled corridors of their high school. We are never able to tell who they are, since, invariably, they are shot from behind. Van Sant explained that this repetitious imagery represents “the passages of travel that all of us take to get from one destination to another.” I suggest to Mr. Van Sant that these “passages” are as empty and deadly as the ultimate, off-screen shootings
The title ELEPHANT derives from the aphorism about there being something so huge in the room that it cannot be spoken of. The only clue given to the shooters’ motivation is to see them prepare for their deed by watching some archival Nazi footage on the History Channel. We get little screen time and, therefore, little knowledge of these vicious man-children.
As preparation for their spree, the pretty boy killers very chastely kiss (the initiator claims he’s never experienced a kiss — which is the only poignant line, for me, in the entire picture), and then take a shower together, though we are only shown part of a nude buttock (shot from behind, as usual) before the opaque shower curtains close. There is no suggestion that these are young gays acting out their aggression on those who have stigmatized them. (Van Sant has it both ways by titillating us and then disclaiming any homosexual intention.) The kiss and the shower, like the murderous adventure, are, seemingly, all experimental one-shots.
Although Mr. Van Sant is a gay man, there is nothing about the killers’ behavior to suggest that they are, similarly, like-minded, unlike the implicitly gay liaison between Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in PRIVATE IDAHO.
The improvised dialogue is ponderously banal, which, by contrast, is why the major studios pay screenwriters so much money to invent distinctive, articulate and urgent speech for characters. Of course, those are not Van Sant’s kind of films, except for the low-budget, highly visual PSYCHO. Van Sant has invented his own neo-Naturalism and it is painfully dreary.
I am aware that the Palme d’Or has been awarded to some splendid American films, like SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE and ALL THAT JAZZ, as well as to some perverse ones like the Coen brothers’ BARTON FINK, and this year’s piece of slovenly agit-prop, “FAHRENHEIT 9/11. (The Bush-basher may be crude Michael Moore’s best film, but it was unlikely that it was the artistic highlight of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.) ELEPHANT did about as negligibly at the box office as BARTON FINK, but it will enjoy extended life on cable and DVD.
Ultimately, Van Sant’s films are now less gay then his first MALA NOCHE or PRIVATE IDAHO. They are now simply perverse: that is, Van Sant’s own, private Columbine.

Marco Bellocchio returns to the Festival with GOOD MORNING NIGHT (Italy) a study of the Red Brigade’s 1978 kidnapping of Italian President, Aldo Moro. Such political vengeance sounded a good deal more promising than the writer-director’s dreary, MY MOTHER’S SMILE, at the 2002 festival.
GOOD MORNING NIGHT is a respectable study of the aged, captive Moro — immured in a small, hidden space of an apartment, and of the remorseful young woman Red Guard who tends him and who becomes, progressively, conscience-stricken at the deed.
It’s unfortunate that Signor Bellocchio failed to study Costa-Gavras’ shattering STATE OF SIEGE (1973), in which Yves Montand as a CIA agent is held captive in Uruguay by the Tupamaro guerillas and goes through every emotional swing from protest to resignation. But, somehow, I don’t feel viewing that film would have helped Bellocchio. A maker of political thrillers, Costa-Gavras’ instincts are chiefly to excite and to move his viewers. Bellocchio’s are only to solemnize and, consequently, to bore his.

“S21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE (France/First Run Features) is a grueling and gruesome documentary made at the high school in Cambodia which was turned into S21, an extermination camp.
Filmmaker Rithy Panh, who, himself, spent four years in another Khmer Rouge labor camp, accompanies a former inmate, Vann Nath, the only professional artist in S21, as he confronts his former, abusive captors.
Between 1975 and 1977, 17,000 men passed through S21’s doors, but only 7 survived. For the most part, the prisoners were youthful and completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Their jailers attempted to compel confessions from them by torture, but the victims were unable to confess to crimes about which they knew nothing. The usual charge was allegiance to the CIA, although most Cambodians detested the U.S. for its devastating carpet bombings, which led to the Khmer Rouge takeover.
Cambodia had a population of 7 million in 1975 before the Khmer Rouge came to power. The mass extermination of 2 million “souls” in the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields, during their 4-year reign, might well be termed “genocide” according to “S21’s” narrator.
“S21” is a far more horrific experience than the recent, similar documentary, “ALLENDE’S CHILDREN” a study of the torture chambers of Pinochet’s henchmen, in which Chile’s young dissidents had so many excruciating acts performed on them, that they mercifully expired.
In “S21,” we hear the testimony of a number of surviving prisoners.
Their families were usually slaughtered so they would have no one to come home to, should they, miraculously, outwit their prison guards. A couple of these former guards recreate, unashamedly, their prison routines in the abandoned S21. I can still hear their horrific, intimidating pounding on doors or on rush matting to rouse the day’s fewer and fewer risers.
I admire the technique of director Rithy Panh to get non-actors to perform so naturally before the camera and to find such activities for the survivors as reviewing their coerced testimony and identifying the photos of their fallen comrades.
However, the white English sub-titles at the bottom of the frame or on white shirts and tablecloths, simply obliterates them. This makes the film progressively fatiguing as we miss long stretches of dialogue. Why haven’t all distributors learned that bold, yellow titles solve the insoluble whiteness problem.

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