Review: Elizabethtown

Note: This review was contributed by James Rocchi.

Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) is a tastemaker who’s made a mistake, a sneaker designer whose recent innovation, a shoe with a stingray-inspired sidewing, has landed in the marketplace with a resounding thud. The resulting recall is going to cost his employer about 972 million dollars; in fact, as his CEO Phil (Alec Baldwin, plastic and dry) notes, “You could round it up to a billion dollars.” Phil convinces Drew to fall on his sword – metaphorically – for the media, taking all blame in an interview that’ll hit the stands in about a week. Drew goes home to fall on his sword literally, rigging up a kitchen knife to an exercycle so the blade will be plunged into his heart with motorized power. Just before he’s about to activate his suicide plan, the phone rings. It’s his sister. Their father is dead.

Drew is dispatched to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to pick up dad’s remains and head back to Oregon where sis Heather (Judy Greer) and mom Hollie (Susan Sarandon) await; then, he can get back to killing himself like he planned. But he meets a plucky flight attendant on his red eye flight, Claire (Kirsten Dunst), and maybe life isn’t that bad. …

Life may not be that bad, but this movie is.

Written and directed by Cameron Crowe (and inspired by the passing of his own father), Elizabethtown is a soggy and sugary mess. A longer cut of the film was unveiled to near-universal scorn at the Toronto Film Festival; a few weeks after that debacle (and some serious spin control, with Crowe proclaiming “This movie is definitely a populist film, not created for cynics. …” from the ramparts of Entertainment Weekly), there’s a shorter-but-still-flabby cut of the film that comes in at a briefer (but not better) 123 minutes.

Part of the problem facing Elizabethtown is that Crowe has taken us here before – frJerry Maguire’s career-killing mission statement to the transformation of real-life experience into misty water-colored memories in Almost Famous. Another part of the problem is that Crowe’s style has become a crutch, and his concerns have been strip-mined by all his other films so intently that there’s nothing of any new value here. It’d be very easy to be glib about Elizabethtown’s failings – it turns out that Crowe, like every other goddamn Baby Boomer, gets more boring as he gets older – and part of the reason it’s so easy to be glib about Elizabethtown is because for all of the lost-father grief and mournful themes of the film, it’s pretty glib itself.

Take the lengthy cell-phone conversation Drew and Claire have after he’s arrived in Louisville, talking for hours about their lives. Even with a Ryan Adams track drowning out much of the dialogue and the distraction of a quick-cut cute montage of what the two are doing as they chatter away, it’s still pretty thin dialogue. At one point, Claire intones how “Men see things in boxes; women see things in round rooms.” Dunst can’t make this sound alive because it’s a dead piece of language, and she can’t make Claire come alive because – like Kate Hudson in Almost Famous or Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky – she exists only as a plucky sprite whose sole reason for existence is to help the male lead figure out his crisis. I was puzzled by my reaction to Dunst’s performance in Elizabethtown: Why did her role in this drama seem less realistic than her work in Spider-Man 2? The ugly answer is that, put bluntly, Spider-Man 2 is a more realistic film than Elizabethtown’s phony, cutsey approach to mortality.

Take Sarandon’s reaction to her husband’s death, for example: it throws her into a tizzy of activity, so that we see her learning to cook, learning to fix the car and taking tap dance lessons, culminating in a solo dance number to say farewell to her husband at his Kentucky memorial service. It’s cute; it’s cute as a porcelain kitten with clown makeup painted on it. And it’s just as lifeless and hollow. Bloom may be eager to shed Legolas’s pointed ears and curving bow – you can’t be a Middle Earth elf forever – but Drew never resonates with us in any way. (And as for the idea that Drew’s shoe – saddled with the name ‘Späsmotica’ – would result in a billion-dollar recall, ask yourself why a multi-billion dollar shoe company doesn’t seem to have any market testing or product focus groups prior to launch, or how any corporate marketing or P.R. group would let a shoe with a name that’s a synonym for seizure out the door.)

Crowe lays on the cornpone when Drew’s in Elizabethtown dealing with his dad’s relations and old friends. Drew’s confidant is his cousin Jessie (Paul Schneider), a slacker single dad with werewolf sideburns and a hipster grin who uses the memorial service as a chance to reunite his band, Rawkus, for a farewell rendition of ‘Freebird,’ complete with props. Schneider’s easy to watch, only if because he's handled small-town Southern life before, in the far superior All the Real Girls, a film which lacked Elizabethtown’s star wattage but somehow gave off a lot more warmth and humanity.

Crowe also needs to realize that while pop music can enhance the real emotion in a scene, it can’t make up for the absence of real emotion in a scene. When Drew leaves Elizabethtown with his dad’s ashes, he goes on a cross-country roadtrip with a route and agenda laid out by Claire with matching mix CD’s – so we get to watch Drew visit the Memphis hotel where Martin Luther King was shot while U2’s ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ rings out, and see Drew visit the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma city while Claire’s voice issues platitudes about loss and, yes, America. Some critics suggest that Elizabethtown takes off when it hits the road; I think that liberated feeling is just relief at getting away from the cracker-barrel caricatures in the Kentucky sections of the film who soak the movie in honey-sweet homilies delivered with a drawl.

Early on, Drew asks his sister Heather if their father was a “fun guy.” She tears up over the phone: “Sure, he was a fun guy … especially during the past few years, when you were so busy.” Cat, cradle, silver spoon: The point that Drew needs to live for something other than shoes and career is driven home with all the subtle naturalism of … well, of Susan Sarandon tap-dancing. Elizabethtown may have come from tragedy, but Crowe’s covered the loss of his father with artifice and cleverness and fakeness like an oyster turns an irritating piece of sand into a pearl. If Crowe had the courage to show us some of the real grit and pain of his loss, he – and we – would probably have gotten a far better film than the layers of pop songs and pretty shots and cute smiles and phony-funny moments that make up the smooth, frictionless shine of Elizabethtown.