New Releases: Feb/March 2004 - Elephant | 21 Grams

New Releases: Feb/March 2004 - Elephant | 21 Grams | House of Sand and Fog

Elephant, Gus Van Sant's brief (81 minutes) meditation on the Columbine killings, is, wisely, a lot like the real event. No answers are given, barely any questions are asked, and the film unfolds at a leisurely, inexorable pace that strangles the traditional filmmaking methods of tension and release.

You know what's going to happen at the end, but Van Sant gives the audience absolutely zilch to cling on to; it has the inexorable pull of a bad dream, the kind where you realise you're at the bus stop without your trousers on, only much, much worse. That Van Sant should choose the particularly painful horrors of Columbine and its awful offshoots isn't a surprise either. Both 'Good Will Hunting' and 'Finding Forrester', his two most recent "mainstream" movies, dealt with damaged young males, and of course his shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho featured a fractured young man as its focus as well.

Elephant opens with a sequence in which a car meanders down a suburban street, stroking the pavement, parked cars, and postboxes as it wanders slowly on. In it are John (Robinson) and his father (Bottoms), the latter drunk and in charge of very little indeed. Arriving at the local high school (the film was shot in Van Sant's home town of Portland, Oregon), and utilises real high school students as actors), John commands his father to wait for a ride home while he deposits the keys in the principal's office. This father-son role reversal could initially be peceived as part of Van Sant's attempt to explain the oncoming high school disaster, but it could well be his own post-Hitchcock red herring, as Elephant doles out little if anything in the way of easy answers.

Like the forbidding high school environment, with its echoey hallways and effortless, between-class boredom, the film is content simply to be. Shot in a cramped frame that's more like your television screen than the widescreen composition that marks most films these days, the camera of Van Sant and cinematographer Harris Savides glides behind various students with an almost documentary feel. Fully half of this film is spent seeing the backs of people's heads, which makes sense since that's pretty much the way it is in a school, whether you're in a classroom or not. From the lankily handsome Elias (McConnell) to the African-American student Benny (Dixon), the camera pays only sparing attention to the individual students. At times Van Sant doubles back so that a scene first viewed from one angle is repeated via another, revealing more information, but little that offers any sort of explanation.

The young shooters in Elephant, Alex (Frost) and Eric (Deulen), are seen, variously, playing violent video games, ordering guns off the Internet, and sitting in the back of their class under a barrage of enormous spitballs, but this feels less like Van Sant's attempt to rationalise the unthinkable than a pointedly unsympathetic take on mainstream media's knee-jerk reaction to the abstract reality. When the shooting erupts, and it does, Elephant never even bothers to make it dramatic or even all that visually ghastly. Which, of course, renders it that much worse.

* The title apparently refers to an old simile "you can't ignore this, as you couldn't an elephant in the room".

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Imagine you are holding a beautiful vase in your hands. Examine the pattern on the outside of the vase, feel it, weigh it in your hands. Now you throw the vase against a wall as hard as you can, letting it shatter on to the floor. Look at the scattered fragments of the vase and put the vase back together in your mind.

21 Grams, Alejandro Gonzalex Inarritu's follow-up to the brilliant Amores Perros, is like that and certainly, the unconventional structure will be the most talked-about aspect of 21 Grams. Inarritu and his editors have assembled a single story and cut it into pieces, then they have edited these pieces together, at first seemingly at random. It is the audience's job to figure it out as the film goes on. At first, this is confusing, but as the movie continues, we start to put it all together, and it slowly forms into a cohesive whole. Scenes immediately fall into place, and the chronology soon becomes unimportant.

If it was played out in chronological order, 21 Grams would lose some of its considerable power. The way it is pieced together allows us glimpses at different points in the characters' lives; we see one of them overcome with grief, and then we see them happy and content slightly earlier. This increases the shock of what we have seen and are going to see. Without the unusual style, 21 Grams would still be a wonderful, compelling film, but the overall impact would have been smaller.

21 Grams tells the story of three people whose lives are connected when a single tragic event ties them together. Sean Penn is Paul, a mathematics professor with a bad heart. If he doesn't get a heart transplant soon, he is going to die within a month. His marriage to Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg) has been falling apart for quite some time, but Mary refuses to let Paul die alone. Naomi Watts is Christine, a happily married woman whose life spins wildly out of control, and Benicio Del Toro is Jack, an ex-con who has accepted Christianity in an attempt to escape from his past. To tell any more would be to give too much away.

With 21 Grams, Sean Penn has given yet another utterly outstanding performance. His work here is more subdued than his role in Mystic River, as he is playing a dying man haunted by his past, but it is no less impressive or powerful. Penn does more expressive acting with his eyes and body language than most actors can do with speech; his final, largely wordless (except for a voice-over) moments on screen are some of the most haunting you will ever experience.

Naomi Watts continues to try new things and expand her range. Here, she opens herself up to the camera completely, both emotionally and physically, baring both her soul and her body. This is easily her best work yet, and it should get her the award recognition she should have received for Mulholland Drive.

As Jack, Benicio Del Toro gives his best performance since his Oscar-winning one in Traffic, and his work here is every bit as good. It is powerful, an unflattering portrayal of a damaged man haunted by what he has done. He loves Christ, but he still can't love himself, and much of Del Toro's performance is heart-breaking. I believe this is the best supporting performance of the year.

It is rare for a film to have as many individual strengths as 21 Grams. The story, the acting, the chronology, it all adds up to an amazing film experience, one of the most memorable that cinema currently has to offer.

House Of Sand And Fog

Cast: Ben Kingsley, Jennifer Connelly, Ron Eldard, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Jonathan Ahdout, Kim Dickens, Carlos Gomez, and Frances Fisher

Directed by Vadim Perelman
Written by Vadim Perelman and Shawn Lawrence Otto, from the novel by Andre Dubus III

125 min Cert 15

In House of Sand and Fog, Ben Kingsley's character, expatriate Iranian Colonel Behrani, says something about how Americans look for immediate gratification, can only see what's right in front of them, and don't really appreciate the rewards of hard work and planning. In other words, Americans are shortsighted, and the movie goes about showing how this can contribute to social, cultural, and occupational downfalls.

But House of Sand and Fog plays a fair game and doesn't let the good colonel off the hook either. Within him and his family are much pride, righteousness, and an attitude that equates material wealth to status. These, too, lead to a downfall, and while it's possible to attribute these traits to Col. Behrani's own culture, the movie offers a larger perspective. It shows both ugly sides of the coin of human self-preservation, and how this, when combined with cultural self-centredness, can lead people to destruction.

The film is advertised as a demonstration of what happens when people's dreams of a good life clash with one another supposedly, how "hope can lead to ruin." This take is a bit simplistic - hopes and dreams aren't what cause the ruin, but selfishness and close-mindedness employed in the pursuit of hopes and dreams are. The two adversarial parties - Col. Behrani and his family vs. forlorn American Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) - are fighting over ownership of a house and are both spurred on by an inflated sense of urgency. Kathy, the original owner, took the value of the house for granted until she suddenly lost it, while Col. Behrani sees the house as one step of a rigid plan to rise up from his family's current shamefully low level of wealth. Their clash is one of methods, values, and upbringing. One side is proud, the other is shortsighted, and, as a result, each are blinded to the concerns of the other. The ending is not happy.

House of Sand and Fog puts forward its morals successfully, but along the way it challenges the viewer to latch on to something -it's one of those movies that's proud to be ponderous, and that's not necessarily inviting; nor does its bleakness help in that matter. On the plus side, its cinematography is dusky and beautiful, and its depiction of the suburban American landscape feels appropriately weathered and commercially worn. On the minus side, the plot it uses to illustrate its themes starts out feeling convoluted before allowing itself to settle down enough for the drama to fully take over. Then there is the ending, which can easily be accused of being overwrought.

However, the film's biggest strength is found in the acting. A part of my mind seesawed between accepting what the movie was selling me and allowing my mind to wander in the face of so much silver-plated desperation, and it was Kingsley's performance that tipped the scales. Yes, it is one of those roles that gets to have an infamous "big" scene, but Kingsley conveys genuineness like so few others that it's always a joy to watch. He's helped along the way by a committed Connelly, who seems to be reliving her part from Requiem for a Dream, and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Mrs. Behrani, turning in a very worthy performance of her own.

I like what House of Sand and Fog has to say, and the actors make the film's message stronger. As they play out their situation in the first half, the audience isn't given a clear person to root for; in fact, the characters are mostly pretty pathetic, and I came close to becoming frustrated with their actions. But as the film heads into the final stretch, I began to identify with them more as the flawed people they are. They do some stupid things, and it's to the actors' credit that I actually wanted to forgive them. Yet, at the same time, I know the dark conclusion the film comes to is the most appropriate one. The movie's not easy to sit through, but it has something worthwhile to communicate and strong actors who go all out to communicate it.