A film inspired by Columbine massacre focuses not on violence but a sense of loss

Gus Van Sant, the watchful filmmaker of Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, is drawn to the textures and nuances of adolescence. In Elephant, his meditation on high school shootings inspired by the massacre at Columbine, Van Sant is concerned not with the themes of gun control and gratuitous violence but with the rhythms of sneakers on linoleum. For him, the killings silenced this everyday music of youth.

The best way to approach Elephant is not as a film poet's senseless tribute to high school casualties but as an artist's memorial to teenagers who died senselessly. Elephant is the film equivalent of Maya Lin's Vietnam monument, that collective gravestone to the fallen, in the way it employs abstract means to quantify the loss of life and elicit a profound sense of grief.

The title refers to the parable of the blind men and the pachyderm. For Van Sant, school violence is as massive a beast as an elephant. Each of us may be able to clutch one aspect of the creature, but unable to understand it in its totality.

Lyrically shot by cinematographer Harris Savides, Van Sant's movie provides nothing so convenient as an explanation for why two high schoolers would stockpile firearms and use them to mow down fellow students one autumn day when the pale sky is laced with cotton-candy clouds.

Except for briefly showing one of the shooters bullied by schoolmates in his physics class, Van Sant scrupulously resists dramatizing the events leading up to the high school massacre. This has the effect of desensationalizing the violence, of presenting it as what weak people do to project strength on the outside.

In using violence not to amp up the emotional volume but to hear it as it's lethally experienced, Elephant has a remarkable delicacy of feeling.

This said, Van Sant's movie is so neutral that the camera seems to have swallowed a bottle of mood stabilizers. Much of the action is taken up with tracking teenagers down the endless corridors of a high school in Portland, Ore., watching them stride and shuffle with varying degrees of confidence and timidity. He's not interested in drama but in the behavior of the students, all played by nonprofessional actors, real students who improvised their lines and give the film its authentic flavor.

Van Sant gives us high school archetypes. There is the detached photographer, Eli (Elias McConnell), who tries to connect with people by taking pictures of them. There's the ethereal blond boy, John (John Robinson), crumpled from the impact of his father's alcoholism. And there's the hunky jock, Jordan (Jordan Taylor), hooking up with his honey, Carrie (Carrie Finklea).

And there are Alex and Eric (Alex Frost and Eric Deulen), the young men who will decide which of the characters will live or die. If assault weapons were CD changers, their trigger fingers would be stuck on random play.

The most powerful aspect of the film is its dry critique of how the media (and Hollywood), with its need for clear heroes and villains, flood the zone when it comes to tragedies such as Columbine. In its penultimate sequence, a strapping youth, Benny (Bennie Dixon), hears the guns and strides down the corridors to perform the classic John Wayne intervention. But this is decidedly not a John Wayne movie.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

Elephant *** (out of four stars)

Produced by Dany Wolf, written and directed by Gus Van Sant, photography by Harris Savides, sound by Leslie Shatz, distributed by Fine Line Features.

Running time: 1 hour, 21 mins.

Alex. . . Alex Frost

Eric. . . Eric Deulen

John McFarland. . . John Robinson

Elias. . . Elias McConnell

Carrie. . . Carrie Finklea

Parent's guide: R (school violence)

Playing at: Ritz Five