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The long, winding road to Elizabethtown
The critics are losing their minds over Cameron Crowe's latest, Elizabethtown . I never understood how anyone as talented as a Cameron Crowe could be so reviled by those whose vocation is to appreciate films. Surely we could stand a few more Crowe movies over the likes of, oh let's say...85% of the product that is piped out of the Hollywood marketing machine. While this film is a bit of a disappointment, it is certainly far removed from the abominable reviews that I've seen it garner elsewhere. In the film, Orlando Bloom plays Drew Baylor, a shoe designer, who loses $972 million for his company, a situation that screams for comparisons to Jerry Maguire 's titular character, who loses a No. 1 draft pick client the day of the draft. Drew even loses the perfect girlfriend (Jessica Biel) who's too into the business herself to get past his failure. Drew contemplates suicide (actually seppuku), when a call comes from his sister and mother about his father's death, who was visiting Elizabethtown at the time of his demise. The family must rescue the body from his Kentucky relatives, and since Drew's the responsible one, the job is his. On a nearly empty red-eye flight to Kentucky , he meets Claire (Kirsten Dunst), a flight attendant who insists on chatting with him despite his desire to sleep. Hmmm? A meet-cute on a plane? Didn't Jerry meet Dorothy in the airport, too? You see where I'm going. The material is all too familiar. It's like Jerry Maguire meets Almost Famous , which might seem like heaven to a Cameron Crowe fan like myself but it does not deliver enough of the magic that those previous films possess. Oh, there are moments. Crowe makes you believe in love or fate, or whatever you know is "just a cliché" in your mind but hope that "it's all really happening" in your heart. The fact that Crowe is unapologetic in his optimism seems to stick in many craws, and the backlash is just a bit off base in my mind. Much has been made of Crowe's use of music in his films and that being used as a detriment in reviews I've seen of this film. I think that chatter is way off base. I am not disappointed with the music selection or the fact that there's so much of it. This is a movie and executing a movie well means anything goes if it works, and Crowe's use of music usually works, even in this film. So where does Cameron Crowe go wrong, you ask? What I feel the major flaw in Elizabethtown is the performances and the echoes of his own superior work. It's a mistake to remind the audience of better films. The performances seem heartfelt and genuine with the unfortunate exception of Orlando Bloom. I think he's a good actor and capable of exceptional work at times. However, I can't help but think that he never was able to fully connect to the material because he hasn't lived American culture the way Cameron Crowe lived it. Crowe's characters are so formed by American culture that it would have been extremely hard for anyone to embody one so close to the writer himself without having the advantage of living in America. Martin Kelley is a local screenwriter and filmmaker who co-founded and became co-president of the Atlanta Screenwriters Group, one of the largest screenwriter organizations in the Southeast. |
Elizabethtown
Directed by: Cameron Crowe 
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(2½ out of 4)