Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom
Cameron Crowe's latest isn't as bad as you've heard, but it's still a desperate mess of a movie.
Oct 14, 2005 | Cameron Crowe's haunted village of a movie, "Elizabethtown," has enough detail for 14 movies and not enough ballast for one. At two hours plus, it's both too long and too short: Some parts feel hastily compressed, like a book rendered in print too tiny to read comfortably. Elsewhere, Crowe stretches small moments into a luxurious groove, giving us a tantalizing -- no, make that heartbreaking -- sense of what this picture should have been. Watching "Elizabethtown" was one of the most painful moviegoing experiences I've had in years, not because the picture is that much of a chore to sit through but because I couldn't squelch the feeling that the elements of this movie -- these characters, this story, this assemblage of soundtrack music -- all quite solid on their own, had shaken out into some horribly wrong combination. "Elizabethtown" never quite feels like itself, whatever that self might be; it's as if another, subtly but significantly different movie were desperately trying to break through its skin.
That said, "Elizabethtown" is nowhere close to the travesty you may have been led to expect. Thanks to that pig pile known as "advance word" -- everyone wants to be the first to call an upcoming movie a disaster -- there's been plenty of talk about the problems Crowe has faced with "Elizabethtown" and what he's had to do to try to fix them: Most notably, after a clammy reception at the Toronto Film Festival, Crowe trimmed the movie by 18 minutes, and the cuts may account at least partially for the picture's disjointedness.
But the biggest problems with "Elizabethtown" are marbled through it; I suspect they're nothing that could be fixed in the editing room. Crowe is a writer and director who's guided by his heart and his brains in equal measure, an effortless equation that has worked beautifully in pictures like the ardent teenage romantic comedy "Say Anything," and in the fairy-tale rock 'n' roll road movie "Almost Famous." Because Crowe seems motivated solely by what he cares about, as opposed to what studios think audiences should care about, it's tempting to defend him on purely emotional grounds. (Even his most overtly commercial picture, "Jerry Maguire," is brushed with some idiosyncratic Crowe touches.) But "Vanilla Sky" proved that Crowe, like any artist, is capable of believing wholeheartedly that he's giving us depth and meaning when what he's really serving up is just pretentious poot. Maybe that's why "Elizabethtown" is so frustrating: It at least has the aura of a return to form, but it's so confused and unfocused that it comes off as desperate instead of generous.
In "Elizabethtown," Orlando Bloom plays Drew, a young shoe designer who's just launched a stinking failure of a product, losing the company he works for some $750 million. He decides life isn't worth living and just as he's about to say goodbye, cruel world (he's rigged up a comically inefficient suicide machine from an old exercise bike, a kitchen knife and some duct tape), his phone rings. It's his younger sister, Heather (Judy Greer), with some horrible news: Their father, Mitch, has died suddenly of a heart attack while visiting his relatives in Kentucky. Their mother, Hollie (Susan Sarandon), just can't cope with this sudden disaster. Can Drew, she wants to know, fly to Kentucky (the family lives in Oregon), dress the body in a blue suit, have it cremated, and fly it back home?
Drew agrees to the task, but he feels benumbed by his father's death. We find out that the two were never particularly close. On the plane to Louisville -- the city closest to the burg Mitch came from, Elizabethtown -- Drew meets Claire (Kirsten Dunst), a talkative flight attendant with a gift for sizing people up, accompanied by the constant need to dispense wise-sounding advice. She both befriends and annoys Drew, talking his ear off while he's trying to sleep; but she instructs him in the proper pronunciation of "Louisville" (LOU-a-vull), and also draws him a map to help him navigate the confusing local roads. Claire puts her phone number on the map, too. That's a good thing because when Drew gets to Elizabethtown, he's charmed but a bit bewildered by his dad's enthusiastic, well-meaning relatives, and he desperately needs a friend in this (to him) foreign land.
"Elizabethtown" tries to be many things: a romance, a story about a family coming to terms with death, a fable about some of the weirdly joyful aspects of grieving. Those are all things Crowe should excel at handling. But "Elizabethtown" is a sprawl, perhaps the victim of a kind of ADD of the heart. The story is drawn partially from something that happened to Crowe: His own father died suddenly of a heart attack while visiting his Kentucky relatives, just as Crowe's directing debut, "Say Anything," was getting its first ecstatic reviews.
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