The Story
Elizabethtown Fails to Deliver
“Trust me,” ters on shoemaker Drew Baylor, played by sexy Lord of the Rings elf-boy (also known as Orlando Bloom), whose newest shoe design proves unmarketable, thus losing his company one billion dollars. After finding out about his catastrophic failure, Drew goes hsays Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown, Clair Colburn, “Everyone is less mysterious than they think they are.”
While this may be true in real life, it is not so for the majority of the characters in Cameron Crowe’s latest movie, Elizabethtown. The mystery surrounding these characters does not result from their being astoundingly deep or interesting, but rather the fact that their actions, most of the time, don’t make any sense. In fact the movie itself doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Elizabethtown cenome and prepares to commit suicide. Just as he is about to do the deed, he discovers that his father, who had been visiting relatives in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, just died. Drew travels to Kentucky to make the funeral arrangements, vowing to kill himself as soon as everything is taken care of. But fate, in the form of Kirsten Dunst, steps in on the flight to Kentucky, giving him a reason to live.
It sounds simple enough, perhaps even cliché. How many movies have been made about troubled people who find solace in love? Garden State, French Kiss, and Hope Floats are just a few. But Elizabethtown attempts to hide its hackneyed storyline by creating a series of unrealistically bizarre characters and sub-plots.
The whole shoemaker plot is a cute twist, but is never really resolved. Why is Drew a shoemaker? It’s not an ordinary career; the audience deserves some background information. Perhaps more importantly, what was so bad about the shoe he invented that it caused his company to lose a billion dollars? We wait the whole movie expecting answers to questions like these, but we are left utterly unfulfilled. Instead, we get a thirty minute eulogy from Susan Sarandon, widow of Drew’s father, long-winded blabberings on the eternal agony of being a “substitute person” from Kirsten Dunst, and a seemingly never-ending sequence towards the end of the film when Drew sprinkles his father’s ashes on various tourist attractions across the U.S. If nothing else, these scenes provide excellent opportunity for potty breaks.
The movie does have some redeeming qualities though. During the memorial service for Drew’s father, a giant paper mache eagle that is being propelled through the air ignites, threatening to maim " if not kill " dozens of people. This scene is disturbing, but also extremely funny. Later, when Clair says to Drew, “I'm going to miss your lips and everything attached to them,” it’s corny, but we can’t help smiling and wishing someone would say something like that to us.
But although these scenes are amusing by themselves, they do not flow well together. Elizabethtown is almost self-consciously quirky, as if to say “hey, look at me, I’m not just another typical romantic comedy, I’m dark, I’m obscene, I’m profound.” The movie can’t decide whether it wants to be cute and quirky, dark and satirical, or deep and philosophical, so it tries to be all of them. And the individual segments of the movie are all of these things at times. But when put together, they form a film that is choppy, confusing, and, ultimately, exhausting.