 Starring: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Elias McConnell, Jordan Taylor
Director: Gus Van Sant
Year Of Release: 2003
Plot: Telling the events of one day at a high school from several perspectives, often showing the same thing from different points of view, Elephant builds up the layers of teen life on the day that Alex and Eris decide to perform a mass shooting of their classmates and teachers. Cleverly showing how seemingly small things can change and build people, the film focuses not just on the killers, but also the pressures on those who haven’t turned to guns. |
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Sorry there haven’t been any new Movie-A-Days for the past few days, but unfortunately due to circumstances beyond my control, I wasn’t able to post any. However hopefully things should now be back on track.
While it’s a bit of a love it or hate it movie, I really believe that Gus Van Sant’s Elephant is a truly impressive achievement, and one of the best movies of the 2000s. While there have been numerous attempts to look at and explore why someone would decide life’s gotten so bad they’d shoot up a school, Elephant is undoubtedly the best of them, offering no pat answers, but endlessly hinting and exploring the social world that might create such a horrific event. It’s both unsettling and engrossing, even if it isn’t the most accessible of movies.
The jury at the Cannes Film Festival obviously thought so, as they awarded it the Palm D’Or and Best Director in 2003. However one of the things I’ve always found interesting about the Palm D’Or is that despite the fact that it’s amongst the most prestigious awards in the film world, it seems to actually mean less to the chances of a movie than you might expect. It’s true, of course, that it sometimes gives a small movie a higher profile and means that films that might have struggled to land distribution deals are seen in more countries than they would otherwise be, but it doesn’t really seem to help the film find that much of a wider audience when it is actually release. Indeed despite its reputation, the Cannes jury rarely seem to agree with the rest of the world.
Take Elephant for example. Despite its Cannes win, it was barely even nominated for any other awards. Even the Independent Spirit Awards, which celebrate American indie cinema and would seem to be Elephant’s natural home, only gave it cinematography and Best Director nominations. On its release, it grossed less than $10 million around the world. That means that despite the Palm D’Or it’s the fourth lowest grossing movie of Gus Van Sant’s entire career.
Even the critics weren’t overwhelmingly impressed, as while it was judged the best film at the world’s premiere showcase festival, it’s only got an ok but not amazing 70% Fresh rating on Rottentomatoes. To be fair though, the critics do tend to like Palm D’Or winners, although I half expect reviews become more positive because the festival primes them to look positively at the movies and search out the reasons others have liked it (whereas with movies you have less info on, it’s often easier not to look past the surface).
However this rarely transfers to popular success. Although it’s too early to say what will happen with this year’s winner, last year’s Palm D’or appointee, The White Ribbon, grossed $18 million around the world, which is okay but not spectacular for a world cinema release. However the movie already had a lot of buzz before Cannes and Michael Haneke is one of the big names in euro cinema, so it’s difficult to know if Cannes made much difference. Probably not, as his previous non-American movie (he did remake his own Funny Games for the US, but that’s an unfair comparison with The White Ribbon), Hidden (Cache) made about the same worldwide without a Palm D’or win.
The previous year’s The Class did better with $28 million, but even so half of that came from its native France, and nearly all of its gross in the rest of the world came after it also picked up the Best Foreign Language Oscar, which has a much bigger impact of box office success. 2007’s 4 Month, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, grossed just under $10 million worldwide, although here I have to say Cannes probably did help, as it’s difficult to imagine many people at all watching a film about organising an illegal abortion in 1980s Romania without the Cannes boost. And it’s been the same for most Palm D’or winners, with 2006’s L’enfant only make a rather unimpressive $5.5 million worldwide. The last Palm D’or winner that became a mainstream success was Fahrenheit 9/11, and not only was the choice to give it the award more political than artistic, but the film would undoubtedly have become a zeitgeist phenomenon anyway.
Indeed, according to Box Office Mojo, only 12 Palm D’Or winners have ever grossed more than $10 million in the US, and nearly all of those were American produced movie, such as Pulp Fiction, Apocalypse Now, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Taxi Driver. The only exceptions are The Piano and Secrets & Lies. However even here, neither actually made that much cash until they’d received numerous Oscar nominations, so it’s tough to say whether Cannes had any effect on them at all. Even relatively high profile winners such as Dancer In The Dark couldn’t crack $5 million in the US, while 1983’s When Father Was Away On Business could only scratch together a stunningly low $16,131 in the US and $41,000 worldwide.
The fact is, The Palm D’Or may seem to be highly prestigious, but it’s undoubtedly a double-edged sword. A small, foreign-language film may get a lot of exposure from playing in competition at Cannes, but the boon is more from the fact it’s likely to get more and better distribution deals than because it’ll actually make more at the box office due to interest from the general public. Indeed, there’s a chance that for some films it might work the other way around, as for many in the general audience the words Palm D’or are automatically associated with poncey, arty movies that are boring to sit through. It probably for this reason that few of the major American movies that have won, have made much mention of the Cannes win in their marketing.
For these films it’s treated as something that’s nice to have, but the focus is on mainstreaming the movie, rather than giving it the rarefied air the Palm D’or often seems to have. Indeed, did you even realise that as well as Taxi Driver et al that are mentioned above, All That Jazz, Sex Lies and Videotape, Barton Fink, The Pianist, Wild At Heart and Paris Texas were all Palm D’Or winners too? Probably not, as the fact is, beyond the festival itself, a win has fairly little currency, other than as a badge to put on arty movies that are only going to get a niche audience anyway. In all other cases it’s either irrelevant or could harm your chances of selling it to a wider audience.
Maybe this year’s winner, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, will buck the trend, but to be honest, while it’ll be seen in more territories, despite the prestige now attached to it, it’s tough to imagine it’ll be viewed by all that many people. Sometimes this is understandable, as the Cannes jury can be rather idiosyncratic, but often it’s a real shame, as by not watching movies like Elephant, a lot of people are missing out. I genuinely believe Gus Van Sant’s would have done better without the Palm D’or, as I reckon its arty associations turned off a lot of the young audience who might otherwise have given it a chance.
TIM ISAAC
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