When Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) has to fly back to his small hometown of Elizabethtown, Ky., for his father’s funeral, Drew didn’t expect to find romance. Claire Colburn (Kristen Dunst), a quick-witted flight attendant, helps him get his life back on
Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown is a bit like getting a handmade birthday card from your six-year-old son – the affection behind the gesture is admirable, though the gift itself is quite a few elbow macaronis short of a masterpiece.
Personally, I don’t know how people have kids. Let me rephrase that, I know how people have kids, I just don’t know how they tolerate them. And luckily, since Crowe is not my son, I feel no obligation to magnet the writer-director’s wayward Rockwellian ode to middle-America to my refrigerator.
Even before Crowe shot one scene of the film, he had a problem: he picked the wrong actor, Orlando Bloom (Lord of the Rings), to be his big screen Doppelganger and the wrong actress, Kirsten Dunst (Spiderman), to play the spontaneous wildcard love interest.
I refrained from slagging Bloom after his turn in Kingdom of Heaven. He fell hopelessly short of matching Russell Crowe’s brawny tenderness in Gladiator or Mel Gibson’s unflinching righteousness in Braveheart, but the way that film was crafted, he never had a chance to live up to such lofty expectations.
Here, as thoughtful shoe designer Drew Baylor, he feels out of place. In scenes where he has to tell a joke or exhibit the giddy joy of being in love, his delivery couldn’t be more forced if he had a shoe horn and a tight pair of Reeboks.
But while Bloom seems like he just hasn’t hit his post-Legolas stride yet, Dunst’s performance makes you wonder why she continues to get work as a leading lady. The official go-to gal when Natalie Portman turns you down, Dunst is as annoying and unconvincing as ever as the oddly-clingy flight attendant Claire.
The two meet on a flight as Drew travels back to his hometown of Elizabethtown, Ky., following the untimely death of his father. Claire becomes the salvation for Drew, who grew suicidal (in a cute Hollywood kind of way) after he costs the Oregon shoe company he works for almost $1 billion and lost his girlfriend, Ellen (Jessica Biel, Stealth, in a cameo). Alec Baldwin serves up some laughs early on as shoe mogul Phil DeVoss, as he comments in regards to his great loss, “I’ve been crying a lot lately.”
Elizabethtown wallows in predictability. Drew and Claire politick for a while, but anyone who’s read Cinderella knows what happens at the end of these love stories (the phrase starts, “And they all lived-“).
The film’s most interesting character, Drew’s cousin Jessie (little-known Paul Schneider), has trouble raising his unruly son. The grizzled old Southerners advocate giving the boy “a good ol’ fashioned butt whooping” once in a while, while Jessie bravely stands up to them and chooses to be his boy’s father and friend. Though this plot tangent is often a fun and heartwarming one, its outcome is nonetheless foreseeable as well.
And in the main event, which pits Kentuckians vs. city folk, Drew, his sister (Judy Greer, 13 Going on 30) and his mother (Susan Sarandon, who delights in her character’s odd ways to cope with loss) face off with Elizabethtonians over whether Drew’s father will be buried traditionally or cremated and his ashes spread – the latter his dying wish.
As with any Crowe film, Elizabethtown features an impressive rock soundtrack, including Tom Petty and Elton John. For the first time ever, Crowe’s use of music seems overdone. The songs have an obvious value to the filmmaker, but pop music is best used to enrich scenes, not to grab attention away from them.
Though the film has its shortcomings, it climaxes with an amazing rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” by My Morning Jacket that’s perhaps Crowe’s best merger of film and music since the legendary Say Anything scene in which John Cusack held up the boombox playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” A shame there wasn’t a better movie fashioned around this new scene that could have really lifted it into the cinematic stratosphere.
Though Elizabethtown is not the Garden State rip-off the trailer made it out to be, the Bluegrass state deserves better than this.
Contact reporter Patrick Gavin at gavindbk@gmail.com.
