Elephant is writer-director Gus Van Sant's take on school shootings like the one that took place on 20 April 1999 at Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Van Sant, director of Mala Noche (1985), a poetic masterpiece about a gay convenience store cashier's hopeless crush on a younger illegal immigrant, and Drugstore Cowboy (1989), is a good man for the job because his best work has been out of the mainstream. He can't think his way into the Hollywood box (not even in his best-known and most popular work, Good Will Hunting (1997), Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's shrewd piece of juvenile narcissism) and Columbine is the kind of complex situation that doesn't fit in that box (custom-cut for melodrama and heroic romance). In Elephant Van Sant isn't trying to think at all, but to see. His achievement here with this hot topic is perhaps mostly negative: he's so concerned with devising a moviemaking technique for avoiding glib answers that he doesn't get past the technique. But the technique has a definite fascination.

You can tell what Van Sant didn't want: an overwrought script that merely dramatized the usual editorial explanations of such crimes. Columbine is an ideological Rorschach ink blot--people's "explanations" tend to be coordinated to the things they already believe. The editorialists' "causes" are present in Elephant--parents who fail to supervise their children; schools that fail to deal with students who pick on other students; readily available weaponry; violent entertainment; the mystique of extremist viewpoints--but Van Sant's narrative doesn't emphasize them dramatically. No villains, no heroes, not even protagonists, scarcely what you'd call characters at all, in fact. It's an antidote both to Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002), with its obscenely smug self-assurance, and to Nicholas Ray and Stewart Stern's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), with its Technicolor-Freudian approach to teen anguish.

Instead Van Sant and his cinematographer Harris Savides have come up with a visual correlative for literary naturalism: for long stretches their camera simply follows students as they walk around the high school campus. These aren't self-conscious tracking shots of the kind Martin Scorsese used in GoodFellas (1990; in the famous entry into the Copacabana nightclub, for example) in which our awareness of the milieu is heightened by the elaborately timed choreography that brings characters and actions into range just as the camera sweeps past. The artificiality functions in GoodFellas expressionistically to tell you that the gangsters move in a created underworld, a big greased machine.