White Elephant Sale

Still, better The Brown Bunny any day than Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a thinly veiled fictionalization of the Columbine High School shootings that was the most reprehensible, blood-boiling movie I saw in Cannes. Borrowing the title (and a few formal devices) from Alan Clarke’s superb 1989 telefilm (itself inspired by the Troubles in Northern Ireland), Elephant transposes the minimalist style of Van Sant’s previous Gerry on to the fluorescent-lit hallways and freshly waxed floors of the Portland, Oregon, high school where Van Sant (who also takes screenplay credit) shot the largely improvised film. The result is a repugnant act of pedantry, purporting to hold the audience’s nose up to the ugly spectacle of adolescent alienation and the root causes of school violence, only to end up reinforcing every bogus stereotype propagated in Columbine’s histrionic media aftermath. Of course, the two brooding kids in dark trench coats — the ones who play violent video games (when they’re not playing solemn renditions of “Fur Elise” on the piano) — end up the ones who blow their teachers and classmates to smithereens, just as the three girls who fit our cliché of image-obsessed, anorexic cheerleaders turn out to be exactly that. Because for Van Sant, who can’t see the forest for the trees (and doesn’t much seem to want to), Columbine is the rule and not the exception; it’s every last high school in Anytown, USA.

Having stampeded over the Cannes jury to claim both the Palme d’Or and the Best Director prizes, Elephantseems like something that will be in our living rooms for a long time to come, though the movie is as ersatz in what it has to say about American violence as anything people objected to in Dogville. Yet it’s the notoriously travelphobic Von Trier (and not Van Sant) who has thus far been vilified in the American press for his naive observations of “our” culture, for daring to make a movie about the USA without ever setting foot on “our” soil. Understandable perhaps, given that so many journalists came to Cannes seeking signs of anti-Americanism to validate our own freedom-fries Francophobia: Dogville was the big, easy target that Elephant should have been. Evidently Van Sant, riding on Michael Moore’s coattails, is allowed to say things about America that a Dane cannot.