I have seen at least four other films (including Michael Moore's documentary) about the guns in America, and their easy availability - three of these were about senseless shootings in schools. And now we have another.
Unfortunately, this is the least interesting of the lot. Gus van Sant's "Elephant" tops the board in its classic understatement, and weaves disparate strands together in the end. With this movie, which dissects the aftermath of a school shooting starts off with a tantalising premise - what happens AFTER?
It is almost too horrible to bear, the mother (a marvelous performance by Marcia Gay Harden) of a shooter in a school massacre, the traumatised police officer, the headmaster who is so intent on stopping guns in schools that he neglects (oh cliché cliché!) his own family and so on are all formulaic plot devices at the best. The performances by the main actors are really good, but the poor material they have been given negates all.
There is no sense of interconnectivity between the individual subplots, not really even at the end, when a totally gratuitous bit of violence brings just two of the sub-plot protagonists accidentally together.
The movie builds up to nothing, and so ends with a big SO WHAT?
Unfortunately, this is the least interesting of the lot. Gus van Sant's "Elephant" tops the board in its classic understatement, and weaves disparate strands together in the end. With this movie, which dissects the aftermath of a school shooting starts off with a tantalising premise - what happens AFTER?
It is almost too horrible to bear, the mother (a marvelous performance by Marcia Gay Harden) of a shooter in a school massacre, the traumatised police officer, the headmaster who is so intent on stopping guns in schools that he neglects (oh cliché cliché!) his own family and so on are all formulaic plot devices at the best. The performances by the main actors are really good, but the poor material they have been given negates all.
There is no sense of interconnectivity between the individual subplots, not really even at the end, when a totally gratuitous bit of violence brings just two of the sub-plot protagonists accidentally together.
The movie builds up to nothing, and so ends with a big SO WHAT?