Elizabethtown

Elizabethtown (Director: Cameron Crowe)

Crowe is just a master of good, dialogue-driven movies. He wrote the screenplay for Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Then he wrote and directed all of the following: Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, and the remake of Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), Vanilla Sky. That last one has been given a pass by most Crowe followers, but it at the very least made them uneasy. Crowe collaborated with producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner on this one, which makes it another Crowe/Cruise hookup, and we see a tiny reunion of sorts with Cruise the producer working with Interview With the Vampire co-star Kirsten Dunst. This is the perfect L & N Line film, as Elizabethtown was filmed partially in Louisville and of course, Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Mike has a tiny anecdote about this film in a July 14, 2004 post.

Cameron Crowe's bread and butter has been portraying the man-in-transition. He's usually successful (Cruise in Vanilla Sky) and has just lost his job (Cruise in Jerry Maguire, Campbell Scott in Singles) or is like Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) in Say Anything and hasn't figured out what he's going to do yet.

In Elizabethtown, Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) has just made a shoe for his company that has been recalled, and it's set to cost his company nearly a billion dollars worth. So, goodbye to the job (in an excellent cameo from Alec Baldwin). His girlfriend (Jessica Biel) has become unattracted to the scent of his failure. And he seems partially interested in killing himself. That's when he gets a call from sister Heather (Judy Greer) and mom Hollie (Susan Sarandon) that his dad has died in Elizabethtown. He gets on a plane and meets flight attendant Claire (Dunst) and the buds of a love story begin. In Kentucky, the fish-out-of-water meets his hick relatives, including Jessie (Nashville native Paul Schneider), who has father issues of his own. Drew tries to figure out what is right for his father's funeral arrangements while getting into long cell phone conversations with Claire, and some sort of enlightenment is supposed to occur.

This is a problematic movie. I can see why Crowe had troubles when he showed this at the Toronto Film Festival and had to cut some of the movie. It's not focused. Is this a man trying to come to terms with the father he didn't really know, or is it a surreal Before Sunrise type of love story? And it's certainly not both. The issues of his father aren't very emotionally impactful, although there are attempts that come up short. And the love story is a bit disjointed and confusing--I can accept that, because most of those relationships based on exciting talk and not pure physical chemistry can be confusing. But I think there's something deeply muddled here. And there's a point where Susan Sarandon has a speech near the end that is amusing but way off-subject and pulled me out of the movie.

You didn't get that much with Crowe's earlier work. The fat is trimmed and the films are nice and tight. But now that Crowe has become an "it" director, it seems he feels like he needs to say more. But with so many ideas crammed in with ADD, it's hard to become fully involved. I could almost recommend this movie just for the Dunst/Bloom scenes, which are likeable enough, but their conversations pale in comparison to Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. You'll find yourself all at once enjoying this movie and being enfuriated at it. A hard sell.