Elephant (2003)

Gus Van Sant's Elephant took the Palme d'Or in 2003 and has been patiently refusing to explain itself ever since. It follows a handful of Portland high schoolers through an ordinary morning, tracking them down corridors and across parking lots, until two of their classmates arrive with rifles and a plan. The cast is drawn almost entirely from newcomers, which lends the whole exercise a documentary flatness. Nothing is underlined. Nobody announces the theme.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a curious specimen. A gay-straight alliance meeting appears, and Acadia sits through it, though the scene registers as texture instead of argument. Michelle and the three bulimic girls carry private miseries about their bodies, presented as pathology, not affirmation. Race goes unmentioned. The environment goes unmentioned. The shooters buy their weapons online, and Van Sant declines to convert that detail into a critique of commerce. Alex and Eric are bullies' targets and consumers of violent media, and the film leaves the motive sitting there, unassembled. We are given no diagnosis, no manifesto, no list of reforms. The psychology stays opaque on purpose.

Here is the joke, and it is not a joke: the film scores low on sermonizing precisely because it refuses to sermonize. Ebert admired it for draining the violence of purpose and reward, for declining the social studies lecture. A lesser filmmaker would have handed us a cause and a pamphlet. Van Sant hands us a freezer, a counting rhyme, and a cut to black. The result is a film that says almost nothing about anything and somehow says it with unbearable weight. We classify it, we score it, we move on. The corridor remains empty.