Elephant, the latest film from eclectic director Gus Van Sant, is probably closer in spirit to his ill-advised remake of Psycho than any other film in his body of work, and that is not necessarily a criticism.

The grand winner of the esteemed Golden Palm at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Elephant stirred up a hornet's nest worth of debate and controversy even before its premiere. The film is a striking tone-poem that examines a horrific event that scorched American public consciousness and generated an extensive dance-card worth of debate: the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Elephant is neither a documentary nor an insipid, message-filled "Movie of the Week"; the school portrayed in the film is situated in Portland, Oregon, and the characters have names and personalities that differ from the real-life victims. In Van Sant's film, reality is refracted through artificiality, a technique which makes the film haunting, chillingly effective, and, while undeniably a potent, riveting work, ultimately pointless (more on that in a bit.)

Elephant is also notable as a continuation of Van Sant's return to his independent roots that began with the release of last year's ponderous but rewarding Gerry. After making a name for himself as one of the most gifted auteurs in American Independent Cinema with such films as Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant achieved mainstream Hollywood success with Finding Forrester, To Die For, and the multi-Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting. Elephant, with its long takes, deliberate pacing, recursive and multi-layered chronological structure, and full-frame aspect ratio, radiates with the essence of independent cinema from Frame One. Van Sant is not interested in polemics: he provides no explanations for the massacre, nor does he delineate motivations or repercussions. There are no pontifications over such insipid talk-radio topics as gun control, violence in the media, permissive parenting, school prayer, or personal responsibility. The film begins and ends abruptly, without resolution, climax, or closure.

There are hints, symbols and allegories scattered throughout the film, of course. The opening scene features a parent driving his child to the school on the day of the massacre, intoxicated behind the wheel, swerving and side-swiping cars along the way. In one haunting scene, one of the teen killers is shown playing a beautiful rendition of Beethoven's Fur Elise on the piano while another is furiously pawing a gamepad, gunning people down in a Doom-styled video game (upon completion of the piece, the teen then gives the piano the finger after slamming his hands down on the keyboard.) Cinematic nods are given towards topics like alienation, bullying, bulimia, proliferation of firearms, obsession, homosexuality, and rage, topics that comprise a mosaic of reasons that might have caused something like Columbine to occur.

So why is Elephant so similar in spirit to the Psycho remake? In essence, the film is little more than a recreation of a horrific event burned into the public psyche, much as a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock is both completely familiar yet viewed through a new set of eyes. We know what's going to happen, yet we examine it through a different lens.

In structure, the entire film is a middle-act, lacking introduction, climax, or epilogue. In many ways, Elephant exists without reason in and of itself; without public knowledge of the events of April 20, 1999, the film lacks context. Characters are introduced, with varying levels of depth into their personalities, but they are ultimately set up as dominoes to be knocked down later. To a modern audience, Elephant is both intimately familiar and horribly distant. As Van Sant maneuvers characters like chess pieces into such areas as the cafeteria or the library, we as the audience know that these settings will be the prime locations of the massacre. When one of the characters walks outside as the two killers walk into the frame garbed in fatigues and clutching duffel bags, we know exactly what is about to transpire. Four years later, these events are still fresh in our minds and fiercely debated. But without this level of context and awareness, the film lacks self-sufficiency.

And while this seems like a minor nit-pick, the film loses points for engaging in the overused cinematic cliché of having one of the killers move the barrel of his rifle between two potential victims while reciting the "Eenie Meenie Meinie Moe" chant. It was groan-inducing before, and it hasn't changed over time.

That having been said, there is so much to admire in Elephant that one might almost forget such criticisms. Van Sant's direction is tight, focused and chilling. The fractured timeline shows events from different angles and contexts, allowing scenes that seem throwaway in nature at first to be given far more resonance as the film progresses. Performances across the board are phenomenal; the "teen actors" throughout the movie appear far more like "teens" rather than "actors". Each uses their real first name as the name of their character, giving the movie an air of validity in a film that seems lost in abstraction. There has been much talk about the explicit homosexuality shared between the teen killers, or of the "off screen" violence that occurs. Rumors and debate have circulated over the relationship between the two real-life killers vis-à-vis whether or not they were lovers, but in the film it is shown to be true. As far as the "off screen" violence: forget it. While some of the violence is implied, most of the shootings are explicitly depicted in bloody detail. The film eschews cheap and gratuitous gore and exploitation in favor of presenting the horror in a chilling, methodical and realistic manner.

So why is the film called Elephant? It might have to do with the joke about how every body part seems like that of an elephant to a blind man. Or it could be related to the proverb of the elephant in the living room that everyone tries to ignore. The blind and the ignorant -- is that America before Columbine? Afterwards? Gus Van Sant doesn't answer the question, nor does he try to. Elephant is a song, a poem, a lyrical representation of history that encapsulates without annotation. Van Sant's gripping if frustrating film is a chilling and haunting examination that suffers because of its umbilical dependency and link to the collective nightmares of contemporary American popular culture. While flawed, Elephant is a compelling film that acts as a powerful, rousing chorus to a song that demands the audience to provide opening and closing verses, a lyrical bridge without origin or destination.