Elizabethtown

Starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin

Written and directed by Cameron Crowe

Though he warned critics ahead of time that the Toronto cut was a work in progress, Crowe took the abuse diplomatically. He just went back to the drawing board to cut 18 minutes of film and then sent his poor wounded child back into the world to get torn apart by the fat bespectacled jackals who think Brian DePalma is a genius. Come on, I hated Vanilla Sky as much as anyone. But that’s no reason to jump on a guy who bleeds for his art, is it? So I went into Elizabethtown spoiling for a fight, ready to tell every one of those jackass critics who don’t read me where to stick it. No one fucks with the Jesus.

Alas, I bring bad tidings. Elizabethtown indeed lives down to its reputation. At its best it lumbers uncertainly, like a drunken Irishman, in the direction of Crowe’s best romances. At its worst, it’s a desperate, pitiable creature groveling for your affections. Hamstrung by an overwhelmed cast and an undercooked script, the picture is a pretty bad misstep—but it’s no catastrophe. In the words of a Spinal Tap critic, I’d describe it as “ambitiously flawed.”

Like Almost Famous, Elizabethtown is autobiography. Whereas the former film chronicled Crowe’s coming of age as a rock journalist, the latter finds him in middle age and confronting death through a youthful proxy. In this film, his avatar is Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom), an ambitious young product designer at a Nike-like athletic shoe manufacturer. In the bloated opening sequence, we learn that Drew’s new wonder-shoe launch has just cost his company and its imperious CEO Phil DeVoss (Alec Baldwin) close to $1 billion. Never mind that the only employee capable of costing a company $1 billion is the CEO. Never mind that when your wonder-shoe is named Spasmodica, maybe it’s the Marketing department that failed. Drew’s plight is Crowe’s metaphor for the Big Suck, that time in your life when you screw up so badly that you have to reinvent yourself— which means that this film may actually be an allegory for Crowe’s experience making Vanilla Sky.

Moments away from killing himself in the same way that Elliot Smith must have checked out, Drew receives an urgent phone call from sister Heather (Judy Greer): their father has passed away. Can Drew fly to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, have his father’s body cremated and bring the ashes back to Oregon? Never mind that Drew barely knows his father and will have to interact with his hill-william relatives for a prolonged period. Suicide will have to wait. On the plane to Louisville, Drew literally meets cute in the form of sexy, perky, spunky, glass-half-full stewardess Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who’s so desperate for attention that she follows him off the plane and across the airport until she’s finally able to slip him her phone number. If I had a nickel for every time a sexy, perky, spunky, glass-half-full stewardess slipped me her phone number, then I’d be broke.

The problem with Elizabethtown is that the script has no narrative spine. It meanders through a painfully slow setup to illustrate the hero’s existential crisis, then veers into substandard rom-com territory, then stumbles into Altmanesque ensemble-land upon Drew’s arrival at the family homestead. Unlike Crowe’s best films, in which the plot is driven by the entirely believable choices of his deeply observed characters, Elizabethtown is constructed mostly of desperate contrivance.

In over two hours of screen time, we learn nothing about Drew or Claire that makes us accept them as breathing, bleeding three-dimensional people; instead Crowe hauls them from set-piece to set-piece, begging us to feel melancholy, elation, awe and wonder without ever giving us an honest reason to feel any emotion besides disappointment. Drew and Claire are together, and then they’re apart, and then they’re together again, and at no point do their actions make a lick of sense. Because the film can’t decide what it wants to be, it becomes mostly nothing at all. You know your picture is in trouble when you have to trot out Martin Luther King Jr. just to milk cheap sentiment.

And, I shudder to say, sometimes the film is downright embarrassing. Susan Sarandon, playing Drew’s ditzy tap-dancing mother, has possibly the worst role that Crowe ever wrote. And the young leads— look, I don’t want to be mean. They certainly try hard. Dunst struggles like an Okie dust bowl farmer to give weight and presence to her annoying, illogical character. She gets props for the effort. And poor Orlando Bloom; when he stares pensively through his car windshield or has to appear lost in melancholy— in other words, when he doesn’t have any lines— he’s fine. But Crowe’s scripts require actors who can deliver nuance, subtle emotional shadings and subtext, and Bloom’s line readings are reminiscent of a John Kerry stump speech. Give the guy a sword and a bow and get him back to into a CGI epic pronto.

I’m making this picture sound like a disaster. It’s not. The final third of the film delivers some of the emotional grandeur we expect from Crowe. He has a novelist’s ability to use setting as character, and here he doesn’t disappoint; he quickly immerses us in Western Kentucky culture with such finely observed details as Louisville’s Seelbach Hotel and Ale 8-One cola. The soundtrack kicks much ass. And the picture does boast the most stunning performance of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” (featuring Louisville’s own My Morning Jacket as the backing band) ever committed to film. That scene alone is worth the price of admission.

In the film, Drew points out the difference between a failure and a fiasco: anybody can fail, but it takes a true dreamer, reaching for the absolute pinnacle, to create a fiasco. In those terms, Elizabethtown qualifies as the latter. But let’s not condemn Crowe for overreaching. The script needed more work, it’s true. But Crowe is one of the few writer-directors out there striving to create intelligent works of original fiction. For that we should be grateful. Those of us who care about good movies should simply pat him on the back, buy him a beer and tell him, “Don’t worry about it, man. You’ll get ‘em next time.”

November 2, 2005
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