'Elephant' one monster of a movie

Director Gus Van Sant's "Elephant," winner of the Golden Palm at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, explores a seemingly typical morning in the life of a group of high school students in Oregon. It doesn't take long for that morning to turn gruesome in the form of a school shooting spree coordinated by two dejected loners.\n Van Sant's work feels more like a voyeuristic look into an everyday high school than an actual movie. There is essentially no acting in the film (most of the lines were ad-libbed by the cast of teenage unknowns), and once the violence begins, it's eerily dreamlike.\n Chock full of Kubrickian steadicam tracking shots, long passages in which no one speaks and featuring Beethoven's "Für Elise" as a musical undercurrent, "Elephant" makes its mundane high school halls seem utterly haunting, long before the guns are ablaze.\n While no overt references to the 1999 Columbine massacre are made, it's obvious that the film is based, at least in part, on that tragedy. When the two killers appear dressed in military garb and wielding semi-automatic rifles, the correlation is clear. As with Columbine, we are offered no real insight into the motives of the two boys, and that glaring omission only works to the film's benefit.\n The disc is lacking in extras, but does include a brief, understated on-set documentary, which features about as much vague insight into the young actors' personalities as the film affords their characters.\nWhile a school shooting isn't exactly suitable material for an uplifting evening on the couch, "Elephant" is essential viewing for art film fans and especially for parents of high school students.