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REVIEW: ZERO DAY
(Ben Coccio)
Reviewed by MICHAEL ROWIN
a Film Comment online exclusive
"This film is fictional. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental." This routine disclaimer in the closing credits of Zero Day codifies the disavowal and evasion running through 27 year-old Ben Coccio's debut feature. Only people from another planet will fail to recognize intentional similarities to the tragic events of Columbine High School and the story of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Unlike Bowling for Columbine or Elephant, films that deal with high school in general and Columbine in particular, Zero Day exploits vague rumors about Klebold and Harris, purporting to gain insight into their lives and minds. Combining video diary aesthetic with dispassionate neorealism, Coccio provides a superficial treatment of one of the most traumatic events in recent American history.
In the 21st Century simply wanting to show reality, without attempting to answer unsolvable questions, is a lazy approach to filmmaking, a way to avoid complex issues of fact and representation. Coccio doesn't merely fictionalize a true story; he employs one of the currently-fashionable gimmicks of low-budget production - the fake home-movie - to reinforce the "realism" of his film, which also features non-professional actors and real locations. This approach could have brought a new depth to the subject matter; as it is, Zero Day revels in its own technique and never transcends the suspect strategy of the exercise.
The story is straightforward: two teenagers, Andre (Andre Keuck) and Cal (Calvin Robertson) plan a bloody retribution against their high school codenamed Zero Day. Filming themselves during target practice, making explosives, and espousing ideas on effective killing methods, they often address themselves to their future "viewers." Almost the entire film is composed of this "found footage." Coccio has said that he wanted the attitudes of the boys to alternate between conspiratorial, confessional, and confrontational in order to have a "complex, unsettling, and direct relationship with the audience." Unfortunately the film mostly favors the conspiratorial approach, and often feels like a sensationalized how-to on stockpiling weapons and launching attacks against unarmed peers. While Robertson and Keuck's performances are remarkable, their moments of confession and confrontation - sometimes half-hearted, sometimes effective (as in the scene when Andre and Cal, burning their possessions before "Zero Day," needle each other about their prom plans) - seem like poorly established afterthoughts.
Zero Day reveals its falseness and exploitative framework when it attempts to replicate the aesthetics of the home-movie. The Blair Witch Project made notable use of the technique, but did so in order to heighten the plausibility of a fantastic premise (similar to the function of mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap, or dark satires like Land Without Bread). Coccio's "realism" doesn't deal with reality-jump cuts designed to signify the intervals between recording sessions provide a safe, antiseptic version of the raw and unedited style of video diaries. At other times the director "cheats" - employing montage to approximate narrative conventions, he further conflates home moviemaking with an easily digestible structure. When the style switches to surveillance camera footage for the bloody finale, the film looses all semblance of intimate subjectivity and settles into exploitive, well-choreographed carnage. Meanwhile, the few instances of the quotidian strewn throughout the film's first half (Cal getting his braces removed; a New Year's Eve party) are not allowed to exist in their own right or in contrast to the sequences in which Cal and Andre draw up their plans. Rather, they amplify the sensationalism, their documentary-like quality boosting the "realism" of Zero Day's cynical appropriation of Columbine.
Zero Day unquestionably is the story of Klebold and Harris, or at least an imagining of it. Coccio, who wrote the script, rounds up the "greatest hits" of common knowledge about the two killers and inserts them into his story without providing anything that would make Andre and Cal distinct as characters. Coccio intends this as a neutral reflection of true events, but actually reinforces all the worn-out speculation about how two good looking rich white boys could do such a thing. Malaise, more or less outsider status, Nazi references, heavy metal, and video games are the only hints we get - then the film cowardly backs off by having Andre and Cal declare that none of the above contributed to their violent outburst. The two killers' media-savvy and self-consciousness suggests that Coccio may be commenting on the elevated stakes behind teenagers' bids for attention in this information and violence saturated era - but he leaves it at the level of an audience-directed wink. Knowing most viewers won't buy into facile answers, he takes the easy way out by making his characters hyper-aware of the possible response to their actions. Offhandedly dismissing these motivations, Coccio simultaneously falls back on their recognizability. In their own renditions, Michael Moore and Gus Van Sant also bring up the commonly-held reasons for school shootings, but whereas Moore at least attempts to examine their validity and Van Sant stays true to the ambiguity, Coccio only pays lip-service.
Zero Day is really no better than a TV movie made to provide voyeuristic titillation and scare parents and authority figures. (The film's ad copy-"Two Kids. One School," "The countdown has begun . . ." "In high school, you're told you can do anything you put your mind to" - could easily apply to an action flick.) The only difference is that the film aspires to be "more than real." Taking a page out of The Blair Witch Project playbook, Zero Day has an official website which provides a timeline of events and a map detailing the killers' movements inside the school, audio recordings of 911 calls, photos of the weapons used, and even an "In Memoriam" page for the "victims." What does all of this tell us about an event as confounding and disturbing as Columbine? Not much, but it speaks volumes about Coccio and Avatar Films' marketing. The "reality based" schematics of additional features like the website, as fetishistically detailed as the characters' pre-massacre preparations, emphasize technique while glossing over meaning and intention. There may be no answer to Columbine and other school shootings around the nation, but Coccio doesn't even care to poke around the edges of the issue.
Similar to MTV-style documentary, accessible art cinema, and hyperreal shtick, respectively, Bowling for Columbine, Elephant, and Zero Day all attest to the failure of contemporary American film to represent teenagers and violence in a serious manner. Bowling for Columbine is bad filmmaking, but an anguished search for the sickness at the heart of American culture comes through. Elephant is flawed, but Van Sant's portrait of youth reveals an expression of love and empathy. Zero Day, however, is false on so many levels, despite its admittedly skilled execution, that one must struggle to discern its larger implications. Perhaps it's a generational issue - Coccio, a callow twentysomething, lacks the critical distance Moore and Van Sant bring to the topic; he certainly comes from a very different aesthetic sensibility, one which heralds mimesis over any sort of political or moral questioning.
Zero Day is neither the "end of realism" nor the "death of representation," but it is nonetheless problematic. Although of a different cultural currency than the breed of moronic "reality" TV shows, it unwittingly feeds the urge for as close a depiction of reality as possible, without any of reality's gaps or messy inconsistencies. "I did not set out to make a movie about an issue. I simply wanted to tell a compelling, engaging story that felt real, and was hard to look away from," says Coccio. He's succeeded, but not through challenging narrative apporach or complex characterizations. He simply plows ahead, failing to see how his opportunistic blending of shallow postmodern realism and an inherently compelling hot-button subject is indeed "about an issue." Although I'd like to believe that Coccio had a genuine interest in why Columbine happened, I wonder if he reflected on the motivations behind his own film at all.
- MICHAEL ROWIN
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
