Gus Van Sant's response to the Columbine school shooting, an unemotional, calculated, measured, extremely limited response, not in the least freed up by its fictionalization: the action takes place in Oregon, during football season, among autumn leaves, and the body count appears to climb higher than the reality. In the early stages there are no internal indications of where we are headed. A cross-section of average high-school students will be rounded up one at a time, two at a time, three at a time. The incidents are banal, the dialogue hollow ("You goin' to the concert tonight?" "You guys wanna go shopping today?"), the acting timid and amateurish. Time moves slowly, hangs heavy. It would be a very different viewing experience if you had not been tipped off beforehand that the subject was Columbine. Around twenty-five minutes into the eighty-minute movie, a couple of students enter the school with duffel bags we can presume to contain weapons, but the end is nowhere in sight. We begin to go through the same time period over and over again. One particular moment -- the taking of a snapshot in the hallway -- recurs several times from different angles and at different distances. In some ways the movie seems a companion to the minimalist experimentation of the director's Gerry, although with a crisper, richer image, in the boxy proportions of a television screen. (It was made with financing from HBO.) The precision timing, framing, and camera movement all contribute to a similar climate of strict formalism, a climate that changes not a whit once the shooting starts. Nothing ruffles Van Sant. And despite the hotter topic, it's hard to see how this treatment of it could arouse, let alone satisfy, anybody's curiosity about it. Hard to see, that is, how it tells us anything more about it than that the flow of life got interrupted that day by two kids with no understanding of what life is. It does have something to tell us, on the other hand, about how a sense of the flow of life can be achieved on screen: long shots, long takes, no dramatic inflection or punctuation, a disinterested point of view. Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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