Alan Clarke's Elephant

I'm not sure what, exactly, I have to say about this one. For those who don't know it, Alan Clarke's 39-minute-long film is nothing more than a series of scenes depicting one or more men quietly and efficiently gunning down some other man, either in the victim's own home, or in a public restroom, or in the street, etc. The film is almost completely free of dialogue -- only one of the scenes features any speaking at all, and even that is of the most perfunctory sort -- and each scene includes many of the same shots: a shot, from the side, of the killer walking, a close-up of the killer's face as he's committing the murder, a close-up of the gun being fired, and a medium shot, after the murder, of the victim.

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I first found out about this film by reading an interview with Gus Van Sant regarding his own film called Elephant, about the Columbine school massacre. Van Sant acknowledged his clear debt to Clarke's film by pointing out, among other things, that he'd simply lifted Clarke's title. Both films share other similarities, such as a fascination with showing people walking. This has become a big thing with Van Sant of late, and you can see all the inspiration for it in Clarke's film. As I said, each killer is shown walking for a fairly long stretch before he reaches his victim, and Clarke's camera does nothing more than dolly along beside him, the microphones picking up (or adding later) the sound of the shoes on gravel or macadam or mud. Van Sant has a curious ability to add an enigmatic kind of poetry to his walking scenes, but Clarke seems uninterested in that. He wants only to show -- I believe -- that a human being who has set out to kill another human being has to go through the same old bodily motions that we all do in order to get there, that a conscious decision has to be made to kill, and more actions than the pulling of the trigger have to be taken, and that turning back is always an option. But in his film that option is never taken.

The Van Sant interview clued me in, before I'd ever seen it, that Clarke's film is about Ireland's Troubles. This information gave me the context that, I have to admit, I may not have been able to provide for myself if I'd just watched the movie completely cold. The film aired on BBC in 1989, at a time and in a country that probably didn't need any hand-holding to get the point. I can only imagine the impact this film would have had then, and can only say for myself that I found the film fascinating and sort of bizarre, as well as slightly enervating by the end. Which was probably, in a sense, part of Clarke's point.

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Anyone who wants to can watch Alan Clarke's Elephant here.

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Update: Sometimes, I go too fast. I realize now that not only didn't I talk at all about the title of this film, but I should have. Over at the Palimpsest, where I also posted this, fellow member Fanshawe reminded me of the source of the title Elephant, which is a quote from Irish author Bernard MacLaverty, who referred to the Troubles as "the elephant in our living room". MacLaverty's elephant, at least according to Wikipedia, are the "underlying social problems of Northern Ireland." Taking Wikipedia at its word, it's quite interesting that Clarke would use the title Elephant, because if there was ever a film that was calculatedly disinterested in exploring cause and effect, it's this one.

And Van Sant's film, too, while we're at it, although some claim that the shower scene in Van Sant's Elephant (as opposed to the shower scene in Van Sant's Psycho), which depicts the two killers kissing, is meant to show that homosexual repression was at the heart of their rampage. I'm not buying that, though, not least because, in that scene, the killers don't exactly seem repressed. In any case, the result is that, with both films, the title Elephant just sort of hangs there mysteriously, daring you to make sense of it.

Here are Three Short Reviews

I'm going to very quickly review three movies I saw recently. There's no time to explain why!

The Messengers - d. the Pang Brothers - I can understand why, in horror films, babies are frequently the only people who can see the ghosts. Babies are innocent, and ghosts feed on innocence, and babies believe in wonder and magic and so forth. That all makes perfect sense to me. But why is it the babies are never scared? In this movie, the family getting haunted find themselves in that particular mess because, like so many troubled people before them, they chose to deal with a family trauma by buying an abandoned farm, and Ben, their baby, sees dessiccated, corpse-like people crawling along the ceiling like spiders. What does Ben do? He smiles and points. Yeah, okay the Pang Brothers, I got news for you: babies and other young children scare really easily. My niece became terrified one time when I took her into a corn maze and she saw a teenager dressed in a gorilla suit. So why does this Ben kid have such superhuman courage? Anyway, there was more to the movie, but I didn't like any of that stuff, either.

Paranoid Park - d. Gus Van Sant - I've written elsewhere about my admiration for Van Sant's Elephant, so I had reasonably high hopes for this film, about a teenage skateboard punk who accidentally kills a railroad security guard, and has to weather the guilt and panic that follows. Paranoid Park shares many of the same stylistic and thematic interests as Elephant, and also has much of the earlier film's power to spellbind with minimalist acting and the treatment of the mundane in classical terms. But I have a hard time with a film that deals with a young man who has killed another human being, which then ends up being about that young man ridding himself of guilt, as opposed to owning up to what he's done. Oh, so you purged your soul by writing down your feelings, did you? Perhaps the family of the man you killed would like to read them. Oh, you burned the pages? Well, never mind! Can't be helped!

Gomorra - d. Matteo Garrone - Described simply, this film comes across as a mix of Rome, Open City and City of God -- and I'll bet that's just how they pitched it, too! -- but in truth Gomorra is too well-observed, too quietly disturbing and moving to be quickly tossed off like that. It tells three stories about people within or on the fringes of Italy's Camorra criminal organization: two young, idiotic scumbags who want to take a piece of Camorra's slum turf for themselves; an old-time bagman used to the peaceful aspects of his job who finds himself in the middle of the violence when everything becomes unhinged; and a tailor and entrepeneur, one of whom tries to make too much of himself outside of Camorra's control. Violent, shocking, often beautifully acted, and featuring some of the most striking photography of slums and tenements I've seen -- the buildings where these characters live look like state prisons that have been opened to the public -- this is an excellent film, made by Garrone at great personal risk. If you can catch this in theaters, do it. Otherwise, it's currently On Demand as well, so check it out. This is mesmerizing stuff.

Underutilized

I seem to have, in my head, a growing list of actors and actresses who I believe have been ill-served by Hollywood. Not only Hollywood, really, but the American film industry as a whole. These are actors who get stuck playing one kind of role, or are stuck playing sidekicks or girlfriends to leads who aren't fit to buy them lunch. Most film lovers probably have a list like this, and when you're young you learn to take these people for granted. You know they'll pop up as the lead cop's partner who, two-thirds of the way into the film, is on his way to buy his handicapped daughter the video-game music-toy she's been asking for, and for which he's been saving, when all of a sudden a slumming John Malkovich shows up and pushes him off a cliff. And you learn not to care. And then you see that same guy who got pushed off a cliff in a movie about a guy who only wants justice, or is dying, or he wants justice before he dies, and he's great, and you think, "Well shit. I had no idea."

At the top of my own list is probably Jeff Daniels, so dead-on-the-money in The Squid and the Whale and The Purple Rose of Cairo (and the only interesting thing about 2 Days in the Valley, a film in which he played the main cop's partner, and a film which at least found an original way to write him out of the action, even while crippling itself in the process). I'd also include Jeff Goldblum and Delroy Lindo. Catherine Keener, as well, even though she does land some pretty decent roles from time to time. But the fact that Hollywood still casts her as the Wife or the Girlfriend just kills me.

Anyway. The point of all this is that recently I rewatched Gus Van Sant's hypnotic take on the Columbine massacre, Elephant. I hadn't seen the film in a long time, but one thing that always stuck with me was, as I used to think of him, That Guy Who Played that One Kid's Dad. You Know, the Drunk Guy. Turns out, it was Timothy Bottoms.

He technically has two scenes, but the second one is right near the end, and consists mainly of him walking on screen and asking his son a question. He nails that scene, mind you, and I'm not being sarcastic, but it's the first scene, where he's drunk at about eight in the morning and driving his son to school, that made me say the first time I saw the film, and again last weekend when I saw the film for a second time, "Well shit. I had no idea."

I didn't know it was Timothy Bottoms. I am not, I admit, that familiar with his body of work. But I knew his name, and watching him in that first scene, seeing how quietly he plays shame and humiliation and guilt as his son (a very good John McFarland) is forced to take control of the situation, I realized that Timothy Bottoms is a freaking damn good actor. He gets all the torment and denial of the character across while also giving one of the most genuine drunk performances I've ever seen. Drunk acting must be one of the toughest things for any actor to do, and I say that as a non-actor who can only assume that's the case because I almost never see an actor playing drunk who doesn't botch it, or at least overdo it to the point where you can see his wheels turning. Bottoms gets it absolutely right. That, and everything else I've mentioned, in just a couple of minutes of screen time.

Check out the film, if you haven't already seen it, because the whole thing is quite good, but at least rent it for Bottoms. He does brilliant work here, and attention should be paid.