Calendar Guys

Zero Day is one of two films I know that is based on the killings at Columbine. The other is Gus Van Sant's Elephant.

Van Sant is quite a bit more well-known than Ben Coccio, the director of Zero Day. Van Sant's filmography includes: My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Gerry, and To Die For. He's directed films that are idiosyncratic, and those that could have been directed by anyone. Van Sant has even done a shot-by-shot recreation of Psycho with Vincent Vaughn playing the Anthony Perkins role.

Elephant takes a cool, clinical look at the lives of several students attending school on the day that kids will be killed. We don't know them that well. We just see idle banter. It is, in some ways, an exercise in formality. A scene in the hallway is filmed from three students' perspective.

There are non-naturalistic touches, such as John's drunken dad driving his son to school, and his bland reaction to the school under siege. The three girls who go to puke after lunch. Van Sant has no answers to why the two kids did what they did, only that they did it.

While Elephant spends more time on the students at the school, and comparatively little time with the killers Zero Day spends all of its time with the two teens who are planning to kill their classmates when the temperature reaches zero degrees (thus, the title).

Zero Day is filmed as a video diary, which means it's handheld, and for me, nausea-inducing. For ten years, or so, handheld films were a director's way of showing urgency, giving it the feel of a home video, hinting at the kind of unrest in the lives of those being filmed. In some films, it feels the camera is being handled by an epileptic, and it can be rather nauseous to deal with that.

I've been interested in Columbine-like films, because I'm curious what filmmakers think about the cause of violence, especially, among middle-class kids. If middle-class America fosters a myth, it's the myth that they live good, clean lives where children are well-behaved and well-meaning. It's not the inner city. It's not the impoverished South. Why would teens that seem to have it all behave so anti-socially?

Zero Day doesn't really answer these questions. In fact, were it not about two kids who have made a pact to shoot their classmates, it would be easy to see this as a story about typical teens. In fact, Zero Day, to me, works far better as a naturalistic film about teens. The kind of banter and dialog feel a lot more real than the standard teen fare.

As I watch Zero Day, I ask myself, why do these kids want to kill? They don't seem particularly hateful. They get along well enough with their parents. In fact, as an interesting piece of casting, the real-life parents of Andre Keuck, who plays Andre Kriegman, the ostensible leader of Andre and Calvin, play his parents in the film. It's interesting because his dad is German, so you get that accent. It's so rare to show children of immigrants, especially European immigrants.

Both Zero Day and Elephant don't want to give easy answers to the reasons behind teen killers. They don't want to talk about abusive parents, or depressed children. This isn't, for example, Bus 174, which posits that the reason a street kid takes over a bus is because of the deplorable living conditions for street children, where Brazilian society lets them be abused, until one day, they crack, realizing there's no reason to live the way they live.

If anything, Calvin, who plays the follower of Andre, has a life. He has a girlfriend who seems to like him, and he likes her. He never tells her the secret plan, and it's not clear why Calvin is willing to give up his life. In the periphery, you see a few people who might be so irritating that these two teens would want to take revenge, but really, they aren't the kind of bullies that would be stereotypical, kicking dirt, laughing. If anything, Andre and Calvin are reasonably well-adjusted.

Ultimately, neither Zero Day nor Elephant provide the answers we want or expect. Elephant makes the incident into a formal exercise, telling the same story from different viewpoints, trying to get at the different lives that are suddenly shattered by one horrific incident. Lives, to be fair, are indeed different, as perceived by the individuals, and yet, we often fail to see our lives until something threatens to take it away. Van Sant keeps a clinical distance, even as his camera follows over the shoulders of students as they wander hallways.

His view of high school is oddly distorted, with a small number of students in a huge high school, and the odd way they run, as gunfire is shot.

Coccio, on the other hand, presents the story of two teens, who tell us their plan to deal with the people who taunt them, and yet, outside of these desires, they live life pretty much like other teens in their school. There's no particular reason that they should do this, and yet they do.

Perhaps to make a film of this sort, to push it beyond a movie of the week weepie, clear answers aren't possible. If we get our answers (they are depressed, they are made fun of), then we can avoid the blame, and place it on their shoulders. Yet, such instincts make it difficult for such films to be cathartic in any way.