Elizabethtown

Drew Baylor’s (Orlando Bloom, right) life is changed when he meets an irrepressibly positive flight attendant named Claire (Kirsten Dunst, left) in writer-director Cameron Crowe’s “Elizabethtown.” Copyright © 2005 by PARAMOUNT PICTURES. All Rights Reserved.

 
“As someone once said, there’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco,” says Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom). These words are spoken as truckloads of product are prepared for distribution. The product? Spasmotica, the latest in asinine footwear. The product designer? Our Drew Baylor.

He attends the product launch party, to be greeted by his would-be, soon to be had-been, girlfriend, Ellen Kishmore (Jessica Biel). She’s not there with good news. Instead, she takes him to see the CEO, Phil DeVoss (Alec Baldwin). This can’t be good.

It isn’t.

Phil intuits, “The American psyche is in turmoil Drew, and we have miscalculated.” The company has lost $972 million on the development and launch of Baylor’s atrocious shoe. I find that hard to believe, especially if you’ve seen some of the crap that reaps Nike huge profits. Maybe Spasmotica isn’t manufactured in Southeast Asian sweatshops where they measure worker productivity by the fractions of a second (See “The Corporation”.), but nevermind.

A reporter from Global Business Today is waiting to speak to someone. Phil, out of his generosity, bestows this public relations opportunity (read: disaster) upon Drew. Later, at his apartment, Drew tries to fabricate his exercise bike into a killing machine with a knife attached to one of the moving parts by duct tape. Even this invention turns out to be a failure. This is probably one of the best scenes in “Elizabethtown” because it demonstrates futility with subtle motion. The duct tape’s grip on the knife loosens ever so slightly, just enough for the knife to slip, but not fall out completely. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie reads like… well, that’s just the problem. The film’s structure and its characters are chaotic in design, the film should have been called “Spasmotica.”

The phone rings and postpones his apparent suicide attempt. His sister, Heather (Judy Greer), is calling to inform him that his father has died of a heart attack. Taken to the airport by his mother, Hollie (Susan Sarandon), and his sister, he boards a plane as the sole passenger. Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst), a flight attendant, furnishes him a seat in first class—to avoid having to make trips half-way down the plane to serve him.

She’s so bored she offers to draw him a map to Elizabethtown. They enter a conversation about names. “Mitchell, sometimes Mitch,” Drew says of his father. As he sleeps on the plane, he has dreams of moments with his father as detached from one another as the scenes of this film. Even after departing from the plane, Claire wants to see him off, so she follows him into the airport to remind him about the highway to Elizabethtown.

From there, Drew hits the road, to the sound of an acoustic cut of Lindsey Buckingham’s “Lookin’ Out for Love.” This is the area in which director Cameron Crowe excels… selecting music that serves as the metronome for periods, emotions, events in our lives that are landmarks in our personal histories. Unfortunately, Crowe’s direction is far more confusing here. It takes about a solid hour before the film begins to have a semblance of a cogent narrative.

He’s waved into town by virtually every resident, each of whom points him toward the funeral home. His cousin, Jessie (Paul Schneider) greets him. Jessie strikes me as a 30-something going nowhere fast. He was, to me, the most fascinating character because, well, he’s the only one in the entire film who seems to consist of more than just platitudes. Unlike all the other characters whose monologues flit from one scripted non-sequitur to another, Jessie is passionate two things in life: Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Ruckus—his former Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band.

Drew eventually checks into a hotel to escape the cacophony around the family home. This I can understand and appreciate. I can also relate to the way he wants to reconnect with Claire, probably because she reminds him of the peace and quiet on that plane—a stark contrast to the zoo that is filled with weird uncles, noisy children and gossipy women. However, they play their own version of what Roger Ebert refers to as the “Idiot Plot” in which the one thing both of them need to say is withheld for no other reason than to keep the film going. Unfortunately, this has the exact opposite effect. Instead of going somewhere, this 123 minute film is stuck in neutral for what feels like three hours. By the time they get past their cryptic, pseudo-philosophical quips to one another, and to a genuinely interesting degree of interaction, you’ll have long since mentally checked out.

The movie is rife with attempts at witty aphorism that, I guess, are intended to establish the character of this quirky small town and its inhabitants. “He was an alcoholic with a drinking problem, and he also had three nipples,” offers Aunt Dora (Paula Deen) regarding one of Drew’s relatives. Perhaps it’s meant to reflect the distracted state of people in denial, particularly Drew, with regard to the tragic loss that has recently befallen this town where one person’s presence (or absence) has an impact on everyone. But it doesn’t work.

In “Vanilla Sky,” Crowe had a much tighter structure even though the film blurs the line between reality and delusion. Here, I don’t think anything is meant to be strictly a delusion, except perhaps when Drew approaches his father’s casket. Trying to describe his father’s appearance at that moment, the word “whimsical” comes to his mind. He imagines his father’s lips curling upward into a smile. This is one of the few moments of pure brilliance in “Elizabethtown.” I’m reminded very much of a scene in “L.A. Story,” written by Steve Martin and directed by Mick Jackson, where Harris (Martin) and Sara (Victoria Tennant) are walking through a garden, and as they emerge through the thick of plants and sculptures, they come out the other side as children, hand in hand, and the two lion sculptures on either side of them bow their heads.

Martin’s vision within the romantic satire of L.A. life, absurd as it may seem, is more fitting within its context. This is for two reasons: Mick Jackson does a better job of setting up the context, an early-90’s vision of Southern California that is caricaturesque, charming; and, the whimsy and romance are distributed in the right places so they fit with the narrative. In “Elizabethtown,” the whimsy of the goings-on at the wake, as well as the romance between Drew and Claire—who continue to seek each other out to escape realities they both don’t want to face—is so jumbled and discordant that I couldn’t really lock on to a singular narrative.

Walking together in town, somewhere in the one-third of the film that I actually felt like I could relate to and care about them, Drew and Claire are having a conversation that turns toward his failure at the shoe company.

“You are an artist. Your job is to break through barriers,” says Claire. Cameron Crowe is an artist, but I don’t think he’s being paid to bore people to death. “Have the courage to fail and stick around,” she maintains, as it’s easier to cut your losses and run than to try to regroup and rebuild. Cameron Crowe was the prodigious journalist-turned-screenwriter/director who bestowed upon us such wonderfully honest and insightful comings-of-age as “Singles” and “Almost Famous.” For the last twenty to thirty minutes of this film, however, I kept thinking: Ok, Cameron, Fade Out. Cut your losses and run… and then regroup, rebuild, and make a movie better than this.

Elizabethtown • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Running Time: 123 minutes • MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some sexual references. • Distributed by Paramount Pictures