Elizabethtown: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

Cameron Crowe's “Elizabethtown” is a warm and fuzzy parable about failure and redemption, life and death, love won and love lost--love hanging in the balance.

From Crowe’s own script, the movie is Hollywood all the way. It’s slick and well produced, with a title that makes it sound precious and nostalgic because it is precious and nostalgic.

Here is a film so devoid of hard edges that even a pending suicide is treated as a gimmicky joke. Regardless of how tough life becomes for its main character, Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom)--a failed shoe designer whose bum sneakers cost his company nearly $1 billion in losses--it never feels particularly trying, not even when Drew endures the sort of public ridicule normally reserved for the ultra famous.

Instead, in Crowe's dreamlike world of life lessons learned along this movie's meandering path, real life is tucked neatly away so that the director can make room for the rather sizable suspension of disbelief audiences will need in order to enjoy the film.

The good news is that isn’t difficult to do.

After an amusingly tense lecture given to Drew by his icy boss (Alec Baldwin), who tells Drew that his screw-up is so big, it will affect the global community, Drew returns home prepared to kill himself. And then his cell phone rings. On the line is his sister, Heather (Judy Greer), with the sad news that their father has dropped dead in Elizabethtown, Ky., where he was visiting family, the likes of whom Drew only faintly knows.

According to Heather, their mother, Hollie (Susan Sarandon), is unable to handle the details, and neither can she. Would Drew take care of things? "You're the oldest," she says to him. "You need to do this."

And so Drew does it, fully intending to tend to his father's death so that he can then tend to his own. Since few commercial movies with a substantial budget would allow for that, he meets a potential love interest in Claire (Kirsten Dunst), a quirky flight attendant who might have been considered a stalker if she didn't have such appealing insights into life that tend to get people like Drew back on the right path.

As with Crowe's best and best-known movies, "Say Anything," Almost Famous" and "Jerry Maguire,” this is a soundtrack-driven film whose nostalgic songs give it more emotional weight than it likely would have had without their inclusion.

The cast is strong, but the loose way the movie is assembled and the seriocomic tone Crowe strikes make parts of it feel incomplete, which is ironic since for Crowe, coming to a state of completion is the point of all his films. Will audiences leave "Elizabethtown," saying "He completes me" about Drew and his story?

Doubtful. But they won't have wasted their time, either.

Grade: B-