Elizabethtown

Sit down to this Southern love-feast, but there are some bones to avoid chokin' on..

Official Elizabethtown Site
Romantic Drama/Comedy
Starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Bruce McGill, Judy Greer
Rated PG-13 (for language and sexual situations)
Running Time: 123 Minutes
Released:October 14th, 2005



3 Out Of 5 Bites

What happens when Hollywood- not wanting for the moment to portray Kentuckians as in-bred, carburetor-rebuilding cretins, or as a harbor for greedy, elitist cigarette company criminals- parachutes in upon the state with love on its mind? In this instance, you get Elizabethtown, a heartened attempt to brandish a story of a life and a love found in the final throes of existential desperation.

By director Cameron Crowe's admission, the film is partly autobiographical, but this knowledge only generates a mix-minded sympathy for what must have been a frenetic and jumbled bag of experiences from which to pull, especially if we are: 1) judging by the partial waywardness of the film; 2) dizzy from the plot's multiple dramatic peaks and valleys, or, 3) shaken by the sheer amount we are to consume on our cinematic plate. Already shaved down from the 138-minute version played for several summer film festivals, the 125-minute theatrical release was chock-full of character studies and questions with which to finalize and resolve.

There are some great acheivements. For one, Kentuckians are spared "goon" status as Crowe somewhat tactfully manages to steer clear of stereotyping Southern culture and magnifies the primacy of enduring, tight-knit relationships and the ever-present stronghold of Southern hospitality. As a displaced Southerner in the Midwest, I know these are not mere condenscending cinematic inclusions.

Elizabethtown emerged fairly strong and generated interest as the young-buck shoe designer Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) overlays a running commentary in a diary-styled set of visual vignettes that colorfully lay out the setting of what is one of the grandest failures in all of the shoe world. His design, the Spasmotica, nose-dives to the tune of $972 million dollars and so does his job, girl and joie de vivre, concurrently. It is here where the potentially annoying Alec Baldwin renders a rather funny, sassy and short-lived stint as Drew's boss, president of Mercury Shoes. Heap onto the growing garbage pile that is Drew's life the sudden death of his father, of such he learns while attempting to deal with his grief in a just-as-sudden way.

Onward Drew goes to Kentucky, at the request of his desperate sister (Judy Greer) and mother (the equally potentially annoying, yet, talented, Susan Sarandon). Not eager to manage the family's wishes after the debacle in Oregon, Drew hopes to slink into a temporary oblivion on an empty flight. That would have occurred had in not been for the delightfully pushy lone stewardess on the flight, Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst). At the hands of what must be her Southern lady's intuition, the two strike up a friendship.

While warmly received on the ground in Kentucky and feeling more alone than ever, he finally phones Claire and they embark on an all-night conversation that persists until morning. The effect of the burgeoning relationship at this juncture has a magical and endearing quality. But there's more than just a sweet-tea, Southern gal to court....he has to discover the family he doesn't really know, including his dad- and you know for sure somewhere soon- himself too.

We could have done without the sister for sure, and maybe much of Sarandon's histrionic comic relief, some of which comes off as pushy. But her ten-minute ditty at the memorial is basically overkill. The somewhat implausibe wedding celebration/memorial with attendant rock ballads and incendiary avian replicas begged too much. This is not to mention whether or not a Kentucky-fried memorial would have been so risque, so burlesque without so much an obligatory mention of God. Even secular Kentuckians for the most part pay such homage in the face of their own finitude. In all, we needed to arrive at the resolution of Claire's and Drew's relationship earlier, because somewhere short of this present product lies a film greater that what it is now......just good.

Crowe touches on some issues sure to strike an emotional note with twenty, thirty and even forty-somethings: emotional estrangement between parent/child. Here, he excels at exploring the romantic bonds we forge in the presence of and in spite of our real or imagined failures and the way we can discover the impetus to simply live again.

The disturbing double mindedness of Elizabethtown is its ability to drift us away to something else, once Drew and Claire's relationship arrived at a new level. It seemed as if Crowe wanted to simultaneously extol the worth of the Southern charm he's undoubtedly found appealing while fervently nurturing the story of Drew and Claire. When the story abandoned the latter, the infusion of the extraneous relationships caused the picture to flounder a bit.

Orlando Bloom obliged the Drew's character rather than shone through it. Sometimes flat....rarely charged and riveting, but overall just a bit above plain. Perhaps there was the interpretation of numbness, given the plethora of stressors assigned to him. This might explain some things a bit.

Meanwhile Dunst, as the attractably inviting and cute aggressor, waxes desperate and tenaciously mysterious if not a tad bit loony. Having said that, she is not hard to side with. Deep inside is a hurt begging for realtional salve, but we aren't more privy to the source of that pain as we are with Drew.

Another note of mention is the bombardment of track after track of interpretive music, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. The effect of a great track interspersed throughout a motion picture is a cause worth taking because the great songs get stuck forever with the great cinematic moments (remember "Tiny Dancer" in Almost Famous and "In Your Eyes" in Say Anything?). In E-Town, one doesn't know which one to remember and for what reason because there are so many. The road trip at the end of the movie warranted a sequential flow of track after track for reasons I won't give away here. The only song I came away with was one that boasted some mildly repulsive lyrics in one of the movie's innumerable ballads. This is not a naively prudish critique....it seemed to be more of an overly-ambitious experiment to garner attention for attention's sake, as if to shock us into the giddiness of their emerging relationship.

E-town is not a failure by any means. It is just not exceptional. Still yet, so far this year, not much has rivaled it in the depth for which it strives and there is still enough that does work within it to secure some satisfaction.