Lives that get entwined. Like in the everyday world. A pending tragedy, that of course, we all know it's going to happen. We become witnesses of all that.
ELEPHANT takes us closer to what it would have been like' if we had been given the chance of being in Columbine just minutes before the tragedy. Long minutes, enough to get, somehow, to know better some of those involved. I think that's the reason for the long shots. We are able to accompany some of the students as they walk through the campus. We' are with them' for a while, but long enough to care about what's going to happen to them. That's without the need of lots of information (which anyway is absent from every character), but just because of the fact that we don't see them as strangers anymore.
And then we have also long shots of the landscape, that appear during the movie from time to time. The sky, the clouds, the campus scenes sometimes beautiful, most of the times peaceful, without a care, as a remainder of a peace that is destined to be broken at any moment.
ELEPHANT is not exactly about what happened' in Columbine (it doesn't pretend to portray actual events or characters) but it's about the same tragedy.The movie is not perfect, and it demands a lot of patience from the viewer, not only because it's slow, but because it doesn't pretend to explain or justify anything. It just wants you to be in contact with the students (even the killers) and let you see what happened and leave you with your own conclusions. The reactions could be mixed. I admit some people may find this movie pointless, even exploitive. But it worked for me, and somehow it put a face to those that we, indifferently, had come to know only with the generic name of victims', in an event that, sadly, really happened.
9 out of 10.
ELEPHANT takes us closer to what it would have been like' if we had been given the chance of being in Columbine just minutes before the tragedy. Long minutes, enough to get, somehow, to know better some of those involved. I think that's the reason for the long shots. We are able to accompany some of the students as they walk through the campus. We' are with them' for a while, but long enough to care about what's going to happen to them. That's without the need of lots of information (which anyway is absent from every character), but just because of the fact that we don't see them as strangers anymore.
And then we have also long shots of the landscape, that appear during the movie from time to time. The sky, the clouds, the campus scenes sometimes beautiful, most of the times peaceful, without a care, as a remainder of a peace that is destined to be broken at any moment.
ELEPHANT is not exactly about what happened' in Columbine (it doesn't pretend to portray actual events or characters) but it's about the same tragedy.The movie is not perfect, and it demands a lot of patience from the viewer, not only because it's slow, but because it doesn't pretend to explain or justify anything. It just wants you to be in contact with the students (even the killers) and let you see what happened and leave you with your own conclusions. The reactions could be mixed. I admit some people may find this movie pointless, even exploitive. But it worked for me, and somehow it put a face to those that we, indifferently, had come to know only with the generic name of victims', in an event that, sadly, really happened.
9 out of 10.