In Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown
there's a lot of talk about the difference between a failure and a fiasco. The movie itself, however, manages to be both.
Vaguely reminiscent of Zach Braff's overrated Garden State Elizabethtown is the story of Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom), a rising star at a shoe company until his new design flops, costing the company millions. He is about to commit suicide - via an embarrassingly unfunny setup involving a kitchen knife mounted to exercise equipment - when he finds out his father died.
It is his job to travel to Elizabethtown, Ky., where his father was visiting, and bring the body back to his family in Oregon. Along the way, he meets a flight attendant named Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who almost outdoes Natalie Portman's Garden State character for sheer stupidity and utter lack of believability.
It is not worth explaining the rest of the story Crowe so poorly cobbled. It is hard to believe that this is the same director who made Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous.
Crowe stacks the film with one increasingly unlikely scenario after another. The opening premise alone is a shaky portent of things to come: Would a billion-dollar company really hang so much money on the idea of one young person? It seems doubtful Bill Gates would let a new hire design the next Microsoft package.
The scenes in the titular town are hardly better. Crowe's attempt at making Drew's Elizabethtown kin into lovable, down-home folk does not work because he fails to explain who half of them are or let them develop any sort of relationship with Drew. The result is that everyone seems to be stereotypical caricatures.
But Crowe did not put this bomb together by himself; his two lead actors certainly helped out. Between Kingdom of Heaven and this film, the woefully miscast Bloom is showing an increasing discomfort in roles that do not require him to don pointy ears. His raspy American accent vaguely resembles a young Clint Eastwood, which is amusing but probably not the effect Bloom was going for. Dunst's Claire is full of quirks that are supposed to endear her to the audience, but they are all just annoying; the taking-a-picture pantomime gets old, fast. And if that was not enough, her southern accent flits in and out of just about every scene.
A few things do actually work. A marathon cell phone conversation between Claire and Drew is charming enough, and the film's last section, in which Drew goes on a road trip with his father's ashes, is enjoyable, albeit very silly. And once again, Crowe has put together a great soundtrack, filled with tunes by Ryan Adams, Elton John and Tom Petty, to name a few.
Unfortunately, all this means is that nowadays, Crowe is more adept at making a mix-tape than a movie.
17
Archives
Ben Saylor
