ELEPHANT, at first blush, seems on an inexorable path to controversy. The unexpected winner at the Cannes Film Festival last May, it is a quietly horrifying, fictional exploration of a Columbine-like school shooting…but one with little moralizing about its subjects. The film projects a cavernous, labyrinthine American educational system that has little understanding of the deeper social forces affecting its students. Perhaps most provocative, the two male killers share a pre-annihilation kiss. Add political firestorm, mix well, and serve.

These details, however, misrepresent the undeniably compelling nature of Gus Van Sant’s mesmeric film. Told in sparse, improvised dialogue that erupts between longer, langorous passages of time, ELEPHANT strips the tragic sentimentality from this particular social catastrophe, allowing viewers to look reflectively at a larger context. It is moving, yes, and sad too. But it is also fine, magnificent work that makes one re-consider preconceived notions about Columbine’s massacre and its causes. It is important, timely, and visionary cinema.

Considering that Van Sant reveled in unchecked sentimentalism when he directed another story about two mixed-up boys (the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting), the cool, even tone of ELEPHANT is refreshing and unexpected; it is, perhaps not surprisingly, the best film of his career. His cast, comprised of over a dozen untrained teenagers in Portland, Oregon, reach astonishing heights under his direction, inhabiting their high-school trajectories with disarming honesty and adolescent ritual. Improvised dialogue can often be indulgent and grating, but here the cast’s personal experiences imbue it with a clarity no screenwriter could have attained. Particularly outstanding are John Robinson as a social butterfly who must care for his alcoholic father, and Alex Frost as the social outcast who takes solace in classical piano and internet gun websites.

Unhurried and unconstricted, Van Sant follows a very particular and personal vision, reflected most exquisitely in the cinematography of Harris Savides. The camera floats ethereally around the campus, a seemingly endless connection of nondescript hallways, vacant gymnasiums, and personality-beige classrooms. Savides fills each frame with a classical grandeur, a rolling beauty that underscores both the banal commonality of high school life and the missed opportunities in every moment. It is as if the camera is telling us that life is precious…and no one is there to listen. Savides’ images are complemented by an outstanding score -- a collection of songs chosen by Van Sant himself – that enhances the elegiac quality of the filmmaking. The music of Beethoven, in particular, resonates superbly in ELEPHANT’s atmospheric aura.

Much will be made of the details of the story, where controversy will certainly find plenty to rear its ugly head about. The final strength of ELEPHANT, however, is not in these particular plot points, but in its steady, sharp focus on the larger picture. The murders, we all know, are horrific. But the blissful, unaware hours that precede them -- which make up the majority of the film -- are even more so. The minutiae of high school life becomes electrically charged by the misery we know is imminent, but ELEPHANT never tips its emotional hand to exploit this. The tension stays firmly in us, and not the students -- they are dramatically unprepared for cataclysm when it occurs. When tragedy finally does arrive, even we who knew what was coming are unprepared for its impact. What in the hands of a lesser director might have become overwrought or maudlin is instead a cool, dispassionate sadness at the inevitably of a culture gone awry.

ELEPHANT’s greatest achievement is to remove the veil of history from these events, making the unreal real again. Great art undoes its viewer, in order to remake us. On that score, Van Sant has scored an unreserved triumph.

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