Elephant

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * *)



The films of Gus Van Sant have - like those of Spike Lee - oscillated wildly between the sublime and the ridiculous. The early, edgy, drugged-out 80s anthems for doomed youth Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy (and the bigger-budget My Own Private Idaho) gave way to an indescribably awful adaptation of Tom Robbins' stoner classic Even Cowgirls Get The Blues; the assured crowd-pleaser Good Will Hunting was followed by a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho that felt a lot like looking at a paint-by-numbers copy of a Flemish masterwork.

Rely on him to surprise, then, because his new, remarkable film, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes a year ago, is a true original, a technical tour-de-force whose formal inventiveness doesn't feel like a gimmick, but the film's essence.

It takes its title from a 1989 short television film by Englishman Alan Clarke, set in Northern Ireland, which simply and wordlessly witnesses 18 separate killings. That film's Irish writer, Bernard MacLaverty, had entitled his script after the idea that the Troubles are like the proverbial elephant in the living room; it's all anyone can see but nobody's talking about it.

Van Sant adapts the idea to craft a personal response to the murders that took place at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, five years ago and the result is a film of some mastery that shows up Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine as the shameless, dishonest, self-aggrandising film it was.

In aping the format of the fly-on-the-wall documentary, Van Sant may be commenting on the way the media - particularly reality television - makes prime-time drama of little lives; the certainty of infamy, he seems to say, may have driven two luckless losers to slaughter 14 classmates and a teacher.

If so, it's incidental to the film's main intention and effect which is to re-enact the drama by taking us through the hour or so before the killings, carefully assembling the myriad intersecting coincidences that make up ordinary life and randomly dictate which lives will last and which will be snuffed out.

He does this in a decommissioned school in Portland, Oregon - like his first films, this is set in the Pacific Northwest where he came from - setting his cameraman, commercials director Harris Savides, free in long takes that track the eerily empty, polished corridors or roam the autumn streets outside.

It is, in the end, a film of small journeys, which follows characters repeatedly along certain routes so that we gather only slowly how their fateful walks intersect with those of others.

Sometimes this means we know more than the characters themselves, sometimes less; either way, it means we can't tear our eyes away.

Part of what makes the film so mesmerising is the way it constantly undermines our expectations. The opening shot follows a car along an empty suburban street and watches as it wobbles and sideswipes a couple of other cars. The yelp on the soundtrack makes us think we're watching young hoons, but when we meet the teenage occupant, John (Robinson), the drunk at the wheel turns out to be his father (Timothy Bottoms).

(The latter, incidentally, is the film's only recognisable actor. Van Sant has cast young unknowns and transferred their own names to their characters, which gives them a universal anonymity.)

The massacre, when it happens - and for a long time it seems like it never will - unfolds in hideous silence. There is none of the hysterical screaming we associate with suburban American tragedy. Somehow it's more effective for that. We have got to know the characters by then in a way neither we - nor Michael Moore - ever got to know the kids at Columbine.

Cast: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson

Director: Gus Van Sant

Running time: 81 mins

Rating: R16, contains violence.

Screening: Rialto, previews this weekend, opens Thursday