Posted by Frosty

Elizabethtown

Starring: Orlando Bloom (Drew Baylor), Kirsten Dunst (Claire Colburn), Susan Sarandon (Hollie Baylor), Alec Baldwin (Phil DeVoss)

Written and directed by Cameron Crowe

Running Time: 123 minutes

Rating: PG-13 (for language and some sexual references)

Grade: 2 stars out of 4

Review by Peter Debruge

What do you do when the voice of a generation stops speaking your language? There was a time when Cameron Crowe was that person, when the man responsible for Say Anything... and Jerry Maguire wrote characters who sounded and behaved like real people – like us (and by "us," I mean middle-class, Middle American white folks). Hell, Crowe's characters were better than real people because they could take an awkward situation and find exactly the right thing to say.

Which brings us to Elizabethtown. It's the most personal project to date from a director who's made a career of personal pictures, and yet somehow, it just doesn't connect. The movie stars Orlando Bloom as Drew Baylor, a successful young shoe designer who's just spearheaded the biggest corporate flop since New Coke, a winged shoe called the "Spasmotica" that will lose the Nike-like company he works for nearly $1 billion.

Drew is crushed. This is more than just a failure; it's a fiasco. On his way to meet the head of the company (Alec Baldwin), he smiles and assures everyone, "I'm fine," whether they ask him or not, but it's clear that the person he's really trying to convince is himself. Drew is a long way from fine. As far he's concerned, his life is over, and the only decision left to make is the right way to kill himself. Should he throw himself from the company helicopter? Jump from the third-floor walkway? It has to be dramatic, something painful enough to atone for how he botched the biggest opportunity of his life. Drew decides on death by exercise bike, strapping a particularly nasty-looking kitchen knife to the handle and rigging it stab him over and over, but just when he's ready to flip the switch, his sister calls with the news that his father died.

That's when things start to go wrong. For the first 15 minutes or so, Elizabethtown is right-on. This is Cameron Crowe operating at the top of his game. Tired of seeing movies about the same kind of ad execs and "Hollywood jobs," he wanted to tell a story about a different kind of young professional, and the shoe-designer decision makes the movie all the more real. Drew's situation itself is an extreme hyperbole, and yet we buy it because it's told in the language of life.

But as soon as Drew gets the call from his family, his abysmal failure, which presumably hangs over him for the rest of the film, is quietly swept under the rug. Drew's just an ordinary guy again as he goes home to reconcile himself with his father and fall in love with the chatty flight attendant (Kirsten Dunst) Crowe conveniently positions in his way. In a long article Crowe published in the Los Angeles Times, the director describes Elizabethtown as "a story that would start with an ending, and end with a beginning," and I've gotta hand it to him: The beginning and end of Elizabethtown are some of the best work Crowe's ever done. But there's at least 90 minutes of dead air in the middle that even a non-stop classic rock soundtrack can't seem to salvage.

I've seen Elizabethtown twice now, first as a work-in-progress at the Toronto International Film Festival (where it dragged for roughly 10 more minutes and included an unwelcome epilogue in which the shoes become a smash hit while Drew's been otherwise busy feeling sorry for himself) and again last night, and for the life of me, I can't figure out what's wrong. It's like the whole thing isn't quite finished. The tone is all over the place, oscillating between humor and romance, depression and angst, and the pace picks up in parts but otherwise drags for seemingly endless self-indulgent stretches.

On the surface, the movie reminds me of last year's Garden State, which struck me as one of the best films about my generation ever made (a friend jokingly calls Elizabethtown "Garden State 2: Back into the Abyss," but I like to think of it as "Bluegrass State"). In Garden State, a numb-to-the-world Zach Braff returns home for his mother's funeral and gets blindsided by a spontaneous, slightly crazy Natalie Portman, who sweeps him off his feet and teaches him how to be alive. Switch a few tiny details, and you've got Elizabethtown in a nutshell, and yet Crowe's movie is silent where Braff's had so much to say.

But why don't we feel it? Elizabethtown is full of scenes that should be overflowing with emotional connection. At the wake, Drew sees just how much his father meant to everyone in Elizabethtown and realizes that while his own success in the shoe business has made him something of a rock star (they haven't heard about the Spasmotica recall yet), the lives his father touched probably meant more in the grand scheme of things. At least, that's what I'd be thinking in Drew's shoes, but there's nothing about Bloom's performance to tell us what he's feeling. Turns out that when he's not waving a sword, Orlando Bloom has all the dynamism of a broom handle, and unlike John Cusack or Tom Cruise, I don't buy him as an on-screen stand-in for Crowe (it's like watching Woody Allen cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of his bumbling, insecure alter egos).

From what we've seen on screen, Crowe's the kind of guy who wears his heart on his sleeve. Where other guys wait five days to call someone back after the first date, I imagine him picking up the phone as soon as he gets home and gushing for hours about the way he feels. That's what makes the guy endearing, but Bloom's Drew Baylor is just the opposite. He keeps everything in, shuts himself off to the world, and when he meets the girl who was clearly meant to be his soul mate, all they can do is trade the kind of goopy one liners you find in cheap inspiration-a-day calendars (like "I don't know a lot about everything, but I do know a lot about the part of everything I know, and that's people").

Claire (the flight attendant) is full of these expressions, and she showers Drew with her two-cent philosophies about "ice cream cones" and "substitute people" to the point that I was clawing my armrests. There's a long montage in which the budding lovebirds talk on the phone, and we watch as they blabber but don't catch much of the conversation. They're clearly comfortable enough to use the restroom, clean the cat litter, paint their toenails and wash their undergarments while talking with one another, but Crowe drowns it all in pop music. By the end of it, you're convinced they feel something for each other, but you don't necessarily feel it, too.

In fact, that's the problem with the movie. It's like we're standing outside the window watching this monumental week in Drew's life and yet, try as we might, we can't share in what he's feeling. This is a movie in desperate need of a catharsis, and it never comes (Garden State had that silly screaming-into-the-abyss scene, but at least it did the trick). Everybody around him notices that Drew hasn't cried yet, knowing that he can't come to terms with his father's death until he does. The same goes for his shoe trouble. Before he can move on, he needs to get that defeat out of his system. I'm certain Crowe can write a scene that would solve both problems at once and top even Terms of Endearment for sheer tear-jerk appeal, but he leaves us high and dry-eyed.

Instead, he finishes with a road trip, the one Drew and his father never had the chance to take. Crowe's been laying classic rock songs end-to-end the entire movie, but this is where he can finally pull out the stops (personally, I think "Cat's in the Cradle" would've fit nicely, but he evidently had his own playlist in mind). Drew enters the road trip armed with his dad's ashes and a special map custom-made by Claire, and Crowe kicks it off with a matching Elton John song.

Claire has plotted his exact route and timed it down to the minute, supplying him with mix CDs for the entire ride. How she found time to do this we can't possibly know, but I'm certain of one thing: This is Crowe's penultimate fantasy, a crazy-spontaneous girl who sends him on a road trip with songs that say "I love you" in every way she knows how. The trip is an exhilarating but unclear conclusion to everything that's come before. We see Drew banging on the steering wheel, fighting back tears and laughing like a fool, and we understand that he's gotten over whatever he was going through – but we don't feel it.

From start to finish, Elizabethtown has been Crowe's way of offering us, the audience, a life-affirming road trip of our own. Few things in life are more important than (a) finding yourself, (b) coming to terms with your parents, and (c) learning to open up and share yourself with a partner, and yet only a fraction of the audience will really connect with the way Crowe chose to illustrate these lessons. For everyone else, Elizabethtown can be a tiresome trip made all the more painful by what might have been.