Zero Day **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Ben Coccio Written by Ben and Chris Coccio With Andre Keuck, Calvin Robertson, Rachel Benichak, Chris Coccio, and Gerhard Keuck.
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I have nothing to gain by confessing this, except perhaps a lighter edit. But it may explain why I reacted so strongly to Ben Coccio’s indie drama Zero Day (2002), which screens all this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Based on the Columbine story, it unfolds mostly as a ten-month video diary by two high school misfits, Andre (Andre Keuck) and Calvin (Calvin Robertson), as they meticulously plan their revenge on the school. The two young actors, recruited from high school drama clubs, are so natural I believed them immediately. And unlike the mouth-breathing goons Harris and Klebold were portrayed as, Andre and Calvin are bright, funny, and insightful. I truly enjoyed their company, which made the countdown to their “mission” even more dreadful. I kept hoping they’d change their minds at the last minute, and when they were merrily executing their fellow students in blurry surveillance-camera footage, I caught myself wishing I’d done something to stop them.
Elephant is a beguiling mood piece, gliding dreamlike through the halls of its Portland high school and tenderly surveying a handful of students on the last day of their lives. As Amy Taubin wrote in Film Comment, the movie “takes its cue from the descriptions that survivors and bystanders to horror often give–that time seemed to stand still or events seemed to happen in slow motion.” Like Bela Tarr’s experimental epic Satantango, which Van Sant has cited as a major influence, Elephant often revisits the same encounter from a different character’s perspective. Likewise Van Sant offers multiple explanations for the two killers’ rampage. They’re picked on at school, they’re fascinated by Nazism, they’re repressed homosexual lovers, and–perhaps most dangerous of all–they listen to too much Beethoven.
