Evil Carries No Passport

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To many people around the world, the U.S. is an international bully, swaggering, breaking things, indifferent to the human or political cost. Some movie people, for whom every perceived moral disaster is just a melodrama waiting to be scripted, think they have a fantasy answer to the threat of America: blow it up.

That, at least, was the solution proposed in the two works that dominated the 56th Cannes Film Festival. One picture came in with all the hype: Dogville, Danish director Lars von Trier's upending of Our Town into the tale of a small-minded Colorado community that torments a beautiful stranger (Nicole Kidman) and fully earns its violent comeuppance. The other film arrived with little fanfare but walked away with the major awards. Elephant, which transposes the Columbine, Colo., massacre to an Oregon high school, won the Palme d'Or as top film and the Best Director prize for Gus Van Sant. Dogville was shut out — not a kibble.

The jury issued no manifesto, so festivalgoers were left to paint their own conspiracy theories. And while it wildly oversimplifies Elephant and Dogville to see them as primarily, or even tangentially, anti-American, the jury did honor a film critical of the American addiction to gun violence — as it did with a prizewinner last year, Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine.

Van Sant's terse (80 min.), remorseless film, made for HBO, describes, with fascination but no special urgency, a typical day at a generic high school. For minutes on end, the camera tracks the movements of several students at Watt High: a blond boy arriving late because he has been caring for his alcoholic father, an athlete and his pretty girlfriend planning their calendar, and two lads arming themselves for their own private Armageddon.

Then the shooting starts. The lyrical pseudo-documentary style quickly lurches into horror-film mode. The killers stalk their prey down the bright corridors as efficiently and implacably as any Jason or Freddy. They spring out of nowhere, giving their victims (and the audience) a seismic shock. They are monsters of the id — our worst nightmare. Not America's. Humanity's.

This isn't a terrific film; it's a murmuring, meandering study with an apocalyptic punch line. But the corpses strewing the school corridors don't make the movie anti-American, any more than Hamlet is anti-Danish. Elephant depicts evil, and the ordinary people who, through bad luck, get in its way.