Elephant Song

The story is set in 1966, but you would never know it. A psychiatric hospital has a missing staff member , and a shrink is interviewing a patient who may have had something to do with it. The young patient is about as disrespectful as someone can be, and he provokes the physician into slapping him. The doctor promptly puts his tail between his legs and begs forgiveness . This patient is so sarcastic and condesending that the interview is worthless anyway , other than to see him torment the doc in a meaningless way. SURE ! In the 60s a doctor never would have gotten to that point, He would have shut the patient up long before he talked to him like he was dirt. But if he had slapped him he certainly wouldn't have apologized, in a time when corporal punishment was routine, and if it wasnt they didn't believe kids anyway .

They should have done it more MAD MAN style, where they portrayed people acting the way they did, before lawsuits, tabloids social media had adults pushed around by children and the lunatics running the nut house, literally. I couldn't take the snottiness of the patient any longer and the staff cow towing to him, so couldn't finish it. It's a sad state of movie making where they show the professionals afraid of the underaged , crazy patients, but it is the state of the world today, not 1966.

If you haven't watched the trailer yet, don't. The trailer gives too much away and robs the viewer of the sense of constant discovery, and there is a trove of things to discover.

This is a story of an unloved soul looking for a way out of the somber world of his own feelings and thoughts, while carrying the burden of a beautiful mind. Being a theater piece at its inception, the movie ravishes with its dialogues and beautiful scenes. The lack of color is abundantly compensated by the vivid close-ups, the overall suspense and poignant flashbacks.

Michael (the mental patient being the centerpiece of the story) is lovable from the first seconds as a character and as an actor playing the character. Xavier Dolan has a way of wooing people, so it's very hard not to fall in love with his performance and his character by the end of the movie. He's brisk, accurate, hits the target with every line, and when he opens up in the end, the beauty of it is so tremendous it pierces your heart like a golden needle. The performances of the other actors are no less impressive, but Dolan is an inevitable scene-stealer.

Tragedy here is more of a liberation of sorts. The witty and at times funny story takes a sharp turn into the abyss of emotional pain. All the elements fall into place perfectly, creating a feeling that you've just watched a short.

Elephant Song is a masterpiece worthy of watching and rewatching, listening and relistening. It will leave no string untouched.

When a psychiatrist mysteriously disappears after a session with a mentally disturbed young man, a colleague is brought in to coax answers out of the youth, which leads to mind games, trickery and emotional manipulation in this Canadian thriller. The film starts off well with a great sense of mystery in terms of what happened to the psychiatrist and what the young man is like; he is built up like Hannibal Lector in 'The Silence of the Lambs': a character with whom one has to be careful when talking to. Xavier Dolan (yes, the director of 'I Killed My Mother' and 'Laurence Anyways'!) is superb as the mysterious youth, "just because I'm crazy doesn't mean I'm stupid", while Bruce Greenwood is also solid as the colleague. The film is let down though by a humdrum solution to the mystery and while there is a small emotional wallop as one realises why Dolan has been institutionalised at the end, the final act does not resonate half as much as the opening act. Greenwood's home life is left hazy too; his daughter possibly has Down Syndrome, and he is living with a woman who he calls 'aunt', but is she his sister? Nothing is clear, including why his home life is even included. At its best and most focused though, 'Elephant Song' is a riveting portrait of two very intelligent individuals trying to one-up each other in conversation and manipulation with real tension in the air.

The movie is interesting. The story keeps you guessing and the 'mystery' of missing doctor is good since the crazy man / boy is giving out the details, so you can never be sure whether it is true or not, or is he playing game.

I think that Xavier Dolan was really good at the role of mentally deranged Michael. The role suits him really good. Don't know why, but in some scenes I pictured him in some movies/series based on Marcel Proust's book. He would be perfect for one of the roles of Proust.

I did not really like the ending. It was ...hmmm ... too ordinary. And you see in the end that there was no mystery at all about the disappearance of the doctor. Also, the final scenes were kinda ...weak. But, all in all, quite good, except the last 3,4 minutes.

Eight from me.

Painfully beautiful .a simple story well told and impeccably acted .