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It happened almost with the first step off the airplane at the Toronto airport last month. Someone, a friend or merely a concerned stranger, would stop to warn you about Elizabethtown, the Cameron Crowe film that screened early in the Toronto International Film Festival and was greeted by critics with scornful laughter and derisive cheers. “Horrible,” said one colleague, almost before my bags were in the taxi. “A parody of a Cameron Crowe film.”
Elizabethtown, shorn of 17 minutes post-Toronto, is hardly a catastrophe. It’s a mess, absolutely, more a collage than a narrative. It’s terribly mawkish, too, as though the writer-director had wrung every teardrop from his previous efforts and poured them into a giant bucket in which to take a long swim. Those who have claimed Elizabethtown is an act of self-parody aren’t far off; imagine Jerry Maguire with its “You had me at ‘hello'” ending drawn out for the entire fourth act.
How much you damn Elizabethtown will depend upon how little slack you choose to give Crowe, who once more offers up a fictional version of himself (this time played by Orlando Bloom) to tell a highly personal variation of a true tale. Those who liked his earlier movies, specifically Say Anything, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, will not love this, but they will forgive its flaws. Crowe has earned that much from his audience.
Elizabethtown tells the story of a son going to Kentucky to claim his father’s corpse, as Crowe had to do shortly after the release of Say Anything in 1989. Bloom plays hotshot sports-shoe designer Drew Baylor, who is fired in disgrace from his cushy gig by his Zen-nasty boss, played by Alec Baldwin. Drew is all set to kill himself, using an inventive contraption consisting of a sharp blade affixed to an exercise bike, when his sister (Judy Greer) phones with the bad news that their old man died in Kentucky while visiting kin. Drew postpones his suicide long enough to hop a flight to Elizabethtown (just outside Louisville), during which he meets a deceptively perky flight attendant named Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who has the largest CD collection this side of Cameron Crowe. She will, of course, save Drew from himself; she had him at “welcome aboard.”
In Elizabethtown, a Norman Rockwell painting illuminated by sunsets and filled with the sound of chirping cicadas, Drew meets his old man’s wacky assemblage of relatives, old friends and Army buddies, played by such folks as TV chef Paula Deen, long-ago “new Dylan” Loudon Wainwright III and All the Real Girls‘ Paul Schneider. Also there, in a small role, is Susan Sarandon as Drew’s mother, who flips just a little after her husband’s death. Drew, dressed in Jerry Maguire’s hand-me-down black sport coat and T-shirt, drifts through Elizabethtown like a detached zombie, unable to cry over his old man’s death and unable to connect with the relatives who fawn over him like a prodigal son.
This all sounds so much like Garden State transplanted to the Bluegrass State, but Elizabethtown doesn’t have the glossy sitcom sheen of Zach Braff’s directorial debut. It’s far more rough and ragged, less a linear story than a compendium of scenes set to the Elton John, Tom Petty, Ryan Adams and My Morning Jacket songs that Crowe was listening to when he wrote the film.
There are wonderful moments here: Dunst telling Bloom they’re “substitute people,” killing time with the wrong people till the right one comes along; Sarandon tap-dancing away her bottled-up grief; Schneider getting to sing “Free Bird” at a memorial service, with My Morning Jacket as his backup band. Taken individually, they earn smiles or heartbreak. But it’s just a little too much of too much; you want to tap Crowe on the shoulder and plead with him to rein it in. Yet also know it’s impossible, because as much as this is supposed to be a movie for the audience, it’s actually just for him, the writer and director and son saying goodbye to his dad.
