Posted: Jun 19, 08 7:37am
The film Elephant was made in 2003 by director Gus Van Sant.
This is one of those movies that can only be described as disturbing. As a mother of teenagers, I found it disturbingly disturbing.
It is the story of several different teens, each living in different worlds, (different cliques) but all of whom attend the same high school and each of which are experiencing the trauma’s of adolescence. Some have dysfunctional home lives, some don’t ‘fit in’ in the High School social circles, some have been betrayed by peers…all problems that teenagers face in the growing-up process. It is never a secret to the viewer that the film will end in a Columbine-like massacre, but for me the anticipation came in not knowing exactly who those teens would be that ultimately perpetrate the slaughter. They are all just kids, trying to get through puberty in their own ways. Having since read reviews of this movie, I’ve found that critics are not concerned with keeping the identities of the assassins secret and wonder if the impact would be the same on a viewer who had read the spoilers in advance. I have a feeling that the film would be equally as powerful either way.
It is a slow movie and the actors spend much of it walking down the hallways in “real time”. It is in these halls that anticipation is given a chance to build and the lives in these individual stories momentarily criss-cross.
As the viewer, as the society in which these things are happening…as the parents of the real world, we are not seeing the elephant that should be obvious…but isn’t. Like blind men groping in the dark we are only able to grasp the parts and try to assemble them into a bigger picture.
I saw my children in this film. One the of instigators frighteningly resembles, physically, one of my own. The children in this movie behave the way my teens do, they have the same sort of friends, the same assignments to do for class, they dress the same, they play the same video games…these are our kids.
Not a “feel good” movie, but one that you won’t forget.
