Elephant Graveyard (2008) Online

Avi Belkin's "Elephant Graveyard" is a tour de force, an English language film made in Israel, depicting an American icon.

The fictional film imagines the final days of Johnny Weissmuller, the original Tarzan, inter-cutting black and white scenes from his first film with color scenes of his days at the hospital. The film is elegiac rather than sad, filled with ironic contrasts. It is striking, for example, that fewer words are spoken in the contemporary scenes than in the inter-cut scenes, though those early films still skirted the days of the silent era! Equally striking is the difference between the slow shuffle of the aged film star and his flights in the jungle. And at the end, Weissmuller is alone, no chimp, no Jane, no jungle, not even bad guys, just age. The actor playing Weissmuller achieves a dignity and solemnity that denies pity and makes his decision believable. Though the film ends in silence, what resonates at the end is the defiant, curling yell of the Tarzan, prince of the jungle. In an interesting comment on our verbal society, sound dominates words.

Speaking of words, the Israeli filmmaker is quite successful at evoking American English, with a few notable exceptions. The rhythms of the narrator meant to recreate the typical news broadcaster is not quite native, a person would "wander" in the jungle, not "wonder," and the contraction for "you are" is "you're," not "your." Of course, given the gradual erosion of correctness in the United States, the errors may argue for the filmmaker's even greater familiarity with American culture!