SwiftBlog

"Dark Night" is a film about the 2012 Aurora massacre, by the way.

Well, not exactly.

It doesn't replicate any details leading up to the shooting itself, in which a heavily armed and deeply disturbed young man with a shock of dyed-red hair burst into a multiplex theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises," set off tear gas grenades, and killed 12 people and injured 70. Rather, it is a film about the conditions that led to the massacre. Okay, it's not that either. It's a quasi-experimental drama, shot in Sarasota, Florida with a nonprofessional cast, about the culture of isolation that contributes to the culture of ... Sorry, the alienated nature of the self-image in the age of social media and ... Well, no. No, not that either.

What, then?

That's a major demerit when a film tries to deal with material this complex and wrenching. "Dark Night" is directed by Tim Sutton, who made the musical drama "Memphis" in the same vein. It is photographed by the great French cinematographer Hélène Louvart with deep knowledge of what light does to faces and to the textures of walls and furniture and skin, and edited by Jeanne Applegate in an elliptical, austere style. If skill alone were a determinant of quality, this would be a four-star classic.

But I've seen this film twice and I'm just not convinced it's all that interested in the subjects it claims to be interested in. And that's a deal-breaker of a problem. My friend Greg Cwik's article about the gun culture of the former Confederate states rings more true to me than anything in "Dark Night," and has a lot more substantive things to say about Sutton's subject matter than Sutton does.

Interestingly, Sutton has cited Gus Van Sant's "Elephant," a similarly opaque, eerily beautiful feature about the Columbine massacre, as a key inspiration. Not too many people besides film buffs remember this, but Van Sant drew some criticism for treating Columbine, then America's bloodiest gun massacre, as raw material for a series of elegant tracking shots and lovingly composed images of good-looking teenagers. But compared to "Dark Night," "Elephant" seems like a model of caution and exactness. The movie has a great eye and a great ear but I didn't sense any soul in it, much less an authentic emotional or intellectual connection to the event that inspired it. The chronological games and elliptical editing deny you insight into any particular character. That means that when you look into the eyes of a certain character and wonder if that character will turn out to be the shooter, you have no solid information with which to make an educated guess.

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