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Remember the old saying that every dog has its day? Well, in the movie
world, every reputable filmmaker has his or her dog. Stanley Kubrick had
Barry Lyndon, Steven Spielberg is guilty of both 1941 and
Hook, while Alfred Hitchcock finished his career with the rather
underwhelming Family Plot. Cameron Crowe joins this club with
Elizabethtown.
Orlando Bloom plays Drew, a hotshot sneaker designer who, at the
beginning of the film, is about to get the ultimate comeuppance: the dream
sneaker he designed is about to cost his company a billion dollars in lost
sales. As if that isn't enough to ruin his day, his girlfriend Ellen
(Jessica Biel) is about to dump him and he is about to learn that his father
has passed away.
En route to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to retrieve the body for cremation
as well as meet his relatives and large amount of family acquaintances, Drew
meets a stewardess named Claire (Kirsten Dunst). Starting with a series of
directions to help get Drew from the airport to Elizabethtown, the
quick-witted young woman soon becomes the shoe designer's guide and sole
source of sanity over the next few tumultuous days.
After delivering such great films as Say Anything, Jerry
Maguire, Vanilla Sky and Almost Famous (1992's
Singles is slight but fun), it's difficult not to expect Crowe to
deliver another winner here. All of the traditional elements that shaped his
other movies into winners are here, such as a talented ensemble cast and a
great music soundtrack. The only problem is that when the fundamentals come
together, they don't shape into a decent movie.
Elizabethtown has a ton of story threads that are never fully
developed, characters that are remarkably thin, an overdose of failed
sentimentality and scenes intended to be funny that wind up being
cringe-inducing at best (Exhibit A: Susan Sarandon's standup routine at her
late husband's memorial). All of this culminates in a tedious cross-country
road trip Drew undertakes at the end, a section Crowe should have taken a
pair of scissors to when he edited approximately 15 minutes out of footage
at the last minute.
Augmenting the deficiencies in Crowe's writing is his directing. Failing
to find or keep a consistent tone or true identity for the film, one sits
and wonders just what he had in mind, and what exactly is it all supposed to
be about: is it a story about familial relationships? Is it an examination
of relationships between fathers and sons? Is it a romantic comedy? Is it a
film about being on the road to self-discovery and enlightenment? The mind
wonders.
At this point, I doubt any director out there could get a decent
performance out of Orlando Bloom that requires him to speak more than five
lines of dialogue, so the blame for his ineffective performance can be split
between director and star (it could have been worse. Crowe could have stuck
with choice number one: Aston Kutcher). Sarandon and Greer come off as
irritating, while Biel only impresses on a visual level. Only Dunst and Alec
Baldwin, as Drew's boss, manage to make any sort of positive impression.
I have no doubt that Cameron Crowe, one of the better voices in cinema
today, will rebound with his next effort. Until then, the only way one
should visit Elizabethtown, short of actually taking a trip there, is
to buy the soundtrack CD and skip the film.
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