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Elizabethtown October 17, 2005 |
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This is how Cameron Crowe’s “Elizabethtown” rolls, you tell me if I’m wrong, but I believe I’ve got it down to an exact science. The film starts, a rock song plays, Orlando Bloom ruins a shoe company, a rock song plays, Orlando Bloom contemplates suicide, a rock song plays, Orlando Bloom’s father dies, more rock songs, end of act one. Act two, Bloom flies to Kentucky to deal with the funeral, rock song, meets Kirsten Dunst, rock song, contemplates falling in love, more rock songs, end of act two. Act three, the funeral, a road trip through the South, many, many more rock songs, including the granddaddy of all Southern rock songs, “Freebird”, and a conclusion, followed by credits accompanied by, what, silence, no, rock songs. You get the picture, I get the picture, Cameron Crowe, former Rolling Stone journalist and creator of “Almost Famous”, the best fiction rock film of all time, loves his music, and apparently that means we’re supposed to love it in his movies as well, because it seems like not ten minutes goes by in this film without another carefully chosen rock ballad telling us what to think, and how to interpret the meandering story. The rock song approach to storytelling worked well in “Almost Famous”, with Elton John’s seminal “Tiny Dancer” providing the film’s most memorable sequence, and in “Say Anything” Crowe employed Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” for romantic dynamite, but with “Elizabethtown”, a film at once about a man’s trip down memory lane, and his own faded dreams of glory, the songs come at you so fast it’s an onslaught, and when the music stops, you’re left with a story that’s sometimes sweet, sometimes funny, and most of the time confused. There’s a lesson to be learned here, and it’s that Elton John, Tom Petty, and U2 may sound great on a soundtrack, but they alone can’t save an overwritten piece of nostalgic mishmash. Orlando Bloom, throwing off the shackles of battle epics, stars as Drew Baylor, a hotshot shoe designer who, as the film begins, has just lost his Nike-inspired company 972 million dollars on a shoe designed to approximate walking on a cloud, but looks like something out of “The Running Man”. “As somebody once said, there’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco,” Drew says in narration, “any fool can have a failure, but a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.” Drew’s fiasco leads to his being fired by his unsympathetic boss (Alec Baldwin, in an amusing cameo), and dumped by his sexy girlfriend (Jessica Biel), which then leads Drew to suicidal tendencies, which of course never materialize, because where would a 125 minute film go if the hero died in the first ten minutes? No, his suicide is put on hold when he learns of his father’s sudden heart attack in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and is called out by his sister to arrange the funeral for a man he hadn’t spent much time with in the past ten years. Everybody in Elizabethtown, a quaint Louisville suburb filled with American flags, smiling faces, and white fences, loved papa Baylor, and one of the film’s primary focuses is Drew’s getting to understand what kind of man his father was before moving to Oregon with a woman (Susan Sarandon) the town never quite liked. All that, and it’s not even the main story, as Drew slowly begins a budding friendship with a chatty flight attendant named Claire (Dunst) who makes him believe there are reasons for living beyond fame and success, and they start, sweetly enough, with love and family. Taken from this synopsis, Crowe’s film sounds like it could be an emotional spiritual journey, where a depressed young man’s passion for life is reawakened by another’s death, and the prospects of a new love, but instead, along those lines, it becomes a mixture of various stock cinematic types – self-discovery, grief through comedy, road tripping to catharsis, small town eccentricities and family values, etc… - weaving in and out of the seemingly charming love story to meld into an incoherent jumble. The music only compounds the problem, making the ramblings more uneven, as if one classic tune after another was somehow supposed to be the glue that holds together strands of story that never fit in the first place. Some of the songs work well, like the symbolism of Elton John’s “My Father’s Gun”, but by the time Drew is solemnly touring Martin Luther King Jr.’s death site to the strains of Bono singing “In the Name of Love”, it’s overkill. Bloom and Dunst make a cute couple, and they have charm to spare, and the acting is generally warm and inviting, especially from Sarandon, whose big monologue at the pre-funeral reception is the film’s best scene. But acting is never a problem with Crowe’s films; the problem is whether his audience can fully appreciate a plot less road movie, and the obliviousness of non-stop rock and roll tunes on the soundtrack. It was acceptable in “Almost Famous” because the story there was gold, but in “Elizabethtown” it’s light as air, and all the Southern rock and blues in the world can’t make up for that. “Elizabethtown” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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