Of all the horrible things that happen in this world, the most upsetting to me are school shootings. What drives a young person to take such violent action? Perhaps more perplexing, why isn’t someone else… anyone else… aware that a young person is pushed to the point of doing it? There are no easy answers; it’s very complex and there are different factors that contribute in each case.
For these reasons, I find movies about school shootings extremely compelling. In Bowling for Columbine (2002), documentarian Michael Moore explores gun violence in the shadow of the first major incident I remember, the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. In Elephant (2003), writer/director Gus Van Sant details the day of a Columbine-like shooting from the perspective of the two students who do it.
Perhaps forming a trilogy, we now have White Rabbit, which tells the story of Harlon (Nick Krause), a troubled student, from childhood to the day he plans to carry a rifle into his high school and start firing. It differs from the other two movies in that it provides more answers than questions for his actions. On one hand, it’s not surprising that everything he experiences would lead him to that fateful day..
But on the other hand, giving so many reasons becomes just as ambiguous as giving none. What exactly is Harlon’s breaking point? You can interpret White Rabbit in two ways, one that makes you think it’s a good movie and one that makes you think it’s not. Good would come from embracing the ambiguity; since there are no easy answers, seeing a host of possibilities is a statement that, reasons or not, you can’t explain the phenomenon.
Bad would come from taking the narrative at face value; the cumulative events in Harlon’s life, with one specific trigger becoming the straw that broke the camel’s back. From that perspective, White Rabbit is a little too pat and predictable. I’m less interested in one person’s specific story than I am in the overall phenomenon. It doesn’t give me as much to think about; it indicates that there are easy answers.
Regardless of how we interpret it, White Rabbit is what it is. Based on the script by Anthony Di Pietro, the direction by Tim McCann… the overall pacing and technical quality, the acting, music… I’d say it’s a pretty good movie. It’s an involving story that holds your interest for 90 minutes. Because of the subject matter, though, I hesitate to say it’s “entertaining.”
The filmmakers use a few “tricks” that nearly push White Rabbit into straight psycho killer territory. Harlon hears voices and the panels of his comic book pages come to life, not to mention, he has visions of the white rabbit his father forced him to kill when he was a child. I really like how these tricks are used sparingly. By not overwhelming the story, they are merely another piece of the puzzle, not a single explanation.
When the climactic scene arrives, it’s brutal. While the soundtrack plays in the background like a scratched record, Harlon strolls into the school and deliberately opens fire. It’s a prolonged scene with uncomfortable details like him slipping and falling on the blood of one of his victims. Parts of it are in slow motion, parts of it are out of focus and parts of it are black and white. It’s collectively very unsettling.
My favorite part of the movie, though, is one of its very first lines. Through narration that may be a post-massacre interview or merely internal dialogue, Harlon says his is asked where he got the gun. He replies, “That doesn’t matter.” He’s right. The fact that he has access to a gun is incidental compared to what he ends up doing with it. This effectively eliminates this logistical detail of any blame.
There’s also a curious amount of religion in White Rabbit. The father who may have shaken Harlon as a child and becomes a drug addict, later finds religion. The bully who mercilessly taunts Harlon later apologizes and invites him to a student prayer group. And the girl with a wild-and-free personality, who was his summertime friend, comes back to school in the fall as a clean-cut bible thumper.
All the people in Harlon’s life are saved but him. He seems to rebel against any opportunity for salvation. Maybe he’s wired that way. Many kids are bullied in school; many kids had rough upbringings. But there aren’t many who go on shooting rampages at school. The one thing that’s different must be their mental states. White Rabbit does as good a job as any other movie of making that point.
White Rabbit is available now on VOD and arrives on DVD May 12.
