The most recognizably sympathetic treatment is of a nerdy girl who doesn't want to wear shorts for gym and can't explain why to the gym teacher and is made fun of in the locker room. But that's nothing like the masturbatory homoerotic poeticism of the way Van Sant films the boys. However, Van Sant doesn't in the end compromise his restraint. You can see it in the boy who's a photographer developing his first portfolio. He's an artist figure and you expect him to have a special relationship to the shooting, mirroring Van Sant's. But Van Sant backs away from that once the shooting starts because he doesn't want the movie to have a center. (Who gets shot doesn't follow any predictable pattern, either.) That would violate his focus on the aesthetic means of capturing the lives of the students.

Similarly, he uses non-professional actors precisely because they don't have the power and technique to "say" too much. Professionals might tell you more about what it was like to live through the event but as you can see in a waterlogged hunk of naturalism like Mystic River, experienced actors are too hungry for big scenes, bolded and underlined messages. They'd almost inevitably coarsen what Van Sant is trying for here. (Van Sant's only critical failure of taste is in his use of Beethoven on the soundtrack. He lets it do his work for him and the effect is pre-fab elegiac.)

In Elephant all Van Sant's imagination went into the visual-narrative problem of how to represent his subject without altering it. We can still make out his fingerprints, but he got me thinking. About representation, however, not about Columbine, but that's arguably an even rarer ambition in American movies.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.