There is no doubt that Elephant will inspire heated remarks like the one above, not only because of the subject matter (high school shootings) but also due to Van Sant's decisions as director.  The 82-minute film takes place over the course of a single day and follows the daily routines of about a dozen high school students of all races and social cliques.  Using a combination of long-takes and constantly shifting points of view (to the point of showing some events several times from different perspectives) the camera unrelentingly gazes in at that lives of these teens yet never penetrates far enough to see what makes them tick.

What can be so frustrating to some people is the films failure to give insight into the characters motivations, to shell out easy answers, or provide us with a false sense of hope that the problems occurring throughout the film actually have a solution.  Anyone entering the theater expecting to come out with a better understanding of how something like Columbine could happen will certainly be disappointed.  One of the films major functions is to show cinema's inability to explain or cope with the existential problems of modern life so in a sense it predicts its own failure to give answers since it is in fact saying that no answers can be given.  In this failure, however, is a huge success, for the film is not only entirely honest but offers much insight into the role cinema plays in portraying reality.  With all of its long takes and changing points of view, Van Sant seemingly attacks the issues at hand from every angle possible yet we are endlessly left on the outside looking in.

I don't want to give the impression that simply because Elephant does not pretend to know its characters motivations, that the film (or its characters) is empty.  The minimalist style of the film gives the feeling that the students are adrift, more or less floating through life with very little direction and so desensitized that they are barely able to feel.  When we finally follow the killers around, we realize that they are surprisingly similar to the other students, at least from the outside.  Yes, they are picked on but there is nothing that suggests that their lives are so meaningless that they would take such a drastic action.  What we do see is that through this desensitization, the extreme and the mundane become so mixed together that there is little to no bridge between fantasy and reality.  How much of this is due to video games, television, and the internet?  Well, these are definitely factors that contribute as suggested by several scenes within the film but there is some indecipherable, inexplicable emptiness in the lives of these teens that cannot be understood by past generations nor explained by the new generation.  Elephant exists within this gap, this chasm of emptiness and confusion where kids become the parents, fantasy becomes reality and vice versa, and two kids can walk through a school shooting everyone in site and still feel nothing.

The one thing that may surprise people the most is that despite the topic, Elephant is anything but a dramatic or emotional film in the traditional sense.  It deals with its subjects in an honest, every day matter and treats all of the students as equals.  The sense of emptiness created by the constant tracking shots through the endless hallways is often contrasted by scenes of touching honesty that ring true because they are earned.  There is one scene where John has just dropped the car keys off in the school office because his father is too drunk to drive home.  Frustrated and alone, he retreats to a break room where he tries to compose himself before shedding a few tears.  Another small yet memorable moment was when Alex, one of the killers, sits in his room perfectly playing Beethoven on the piano.  After a few minutes he makes a small mistake and in frustration messes up more before pounding the piano and stopping altogether.  These moments show how fragile the characters are yet gives them humanity and although we cannot understand them we can relate to them.