How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★★☆☆☆ 5 July 2015
This a movie review of ELEPHANT SONG. |
“Mrs Peterson told me you like to play games,” Dr Toby Green (Bruce Greenwood) to Michael Aleen (Xavier Dolan)
Normally non-linear narrative dexterity is something one relishes, from the likes of 21 GRAMS to PEPPERMINT CANDY. With such adroitness, keeping the audience on our toes through concentration and hopeful unpredictability are happy by-products. However, ELEPHANT SONG's choppy story structure obfuscates a lacklustre climax. Seeming to promise something bleakly revelatory, the ending is dully melodramatic.
Normally non-linear narrative dexterity is something one relishes, from the likes of 21 GRAMS to PEPPERMINT CANDY. With such adroitness, keeping the audience on our toes through concentration and hopeful unpredictability are happy by-products. However, ELEPHANT SONG's choppy story structure obfuscates a lacklustre climax. Seeming to promise something bleakly revelatory, the ending is dully melodramatic.
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Everyone has a backstory coming to the fore. No need to scoff at the likelihood of a cast’s issues crescendoing simultaneously, the story just skirts such lack of believability by having psychic wounds red raw – and have been so for some time.
Starting in Santa Clara, Cuba, 1947, and returning occasionally, a celebrated opera singer rebuffs the affections of her young son. January 1966, North America, an interview is taking place between Dr Craig Jones (Guy Naddon) and two of the mental health facility’s staff: Dr Toby Green and Nurse Susan Peterson (Catherine Keener). Tape recorder clicked on, and sombre expressions affixed, suggest an inquiry into something unprofessional at best, tragic at worst.
Jumping back to the incident on Christmas Eve not long before, and flashback within flashback to Cuba, does not take long to irk. The drip-feed of information has the potential of tantalising narrative parsimony; ELEPHANT SONG just has the air of padding out a thin tale. Dardennes brothers (THE KID WITH A BIKE; TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT) this is not.
A Dr Lawrence has disappeared and the institution cannot take another scandal. The last person to see him was patient Michael Aleen. The hospital administrator, Dr Green, takes it upon himself to investigate, partly to get away from his house-frau Olivia (Carrie-Anne Moss), and partly to make sure the ball is not dropped. A meeting of minds is positioned, doctor versus patient. Even with actor Bruce Greenwood’s skills, the tête-à-tête is hardly THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Green’s overconfidence and Aleen’s manipulative insouciance grate quickly, especially the latter. Only when Michael knowingly states, “My job here is to be crazy. Giving you a straight answer does not fall within my mandate of lunacy,” does the annoying verbal sparing go in a different direction.
Almost entirely set in one room, the office of Dr Lawrence, there is no surprise when the credits reveal the source is a play. Unlike the transition of ‘Posh’ to THE RIOT CLUB, the theatrical origins of ELEPHANT SONG are writ large hampering a sense of cinema. Daytime television is the result.
Dr Green and Nurse Peterson were once married, but their daughter died in an accident three years earlier. That they still work together, and that a mischievous patient is aware of their hurt, has the air of quote-unquote drama.
ELEPHANT SONG falls between several movie stools:
- The horror of David Cronenberg’s THE BROOD,
- The novelty of Alfred Hitchcock’s SUSPICION, and
- The electric thrills of Bryan Singer’s THE USUAL SUSPECTS.
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