To get a quick idea of the sensation of spending 2 hours with Elizabethtown, try to visualize the following scenario. You're at a very long memorial service for a stranger. Some obnoxious DJ keeps playing songs at high volumes at inappropriate intervals. There are a lot of treacly speeches about the meaning of life. At one point, Susan Sarandon gets up on a stage and does some ribald stand-up comedy followed by a tap dancing act. And the entire time, you're seated next to this chirpy blonde girl who won't shut the fuck up for two seconds.
This movie is an ugly, horrifying ordeal.
Cameron Crowe has lost his goddamn mind. He's never been my favorite director, though I enjoy Almost Famous. Mainly, I feel like his movies start well, but wind up fumbling on their way to overly-cheery endings. Like his characters pull him into the darkness, but he refuses to end a movie on anything other than an optimistic note, so the entire second and third acts are this futile, unsatisfying tug of war.
But Elizabethtown, a movie obsessed in its own right with failure, is surely Crowe's lamest outing yet. I can even say with some assurance that it will be his worst movie ever. It feels almost like something really gross he had to get out of his system before moving on, the culmination of every awful impulse and stupid idea he's ever had as a screenwriter/director.
In the tradition of films like Crowe's own Jerry Maguire and Zach Braff's 2004 assterpiece, Garden State, Elizabethtown is one of those quirky comedy-dramas urging audiences to take a fresh look at life, to get the most out of every day, to not sweat the small stuff, and a lot of other happy horseshit. In fact, the movie's a lot like Garden State, which careful readers of this blog will note is never ever never a good thing.
Like in Garden State, we open with a chronically depressed young man far from home. Shoe designer Drew Baylor (Orlando Blo.....zzzz....oh, sorry, I must have nodded off there...the movie stars Orlando Bl....zz......oh, excuse me again...) is an egregious, disgusting failure. His latest shoe is threatening to bankrupt the entire company, and the CEO, Phil DeVoss (Alec Baldwin, bad in a small role) wants him to go down with the ship.
Drew's about to kill himself (using a home-designed stationary bike/knife-wielding device!) when he gets a call from his frantic sister (Judy Greer) and frantic mother (Susan Sarandon, the not quite as frantic as Judy Greer). Drew's father has died. They want him to fly to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where Dad was visiting his family, have his body cremated and fly with it back home to Oregon.
On the otherwise-empty flight to Kentucky, an extremely annoying and chirpy flight attendant named Claire (Kirsten Dunst) flirts with him, sits next to him, and essentially forces herself into his life through any means neccessary. You sense, if he hadn't eventually come around and started to chat on his own, her next step would be to spike his drink.
So let's pause now to talk about why none of this stuff works in any way, shape or form. First, Drew. He's uninteresting in the extreme. I understand that the point is that he's a failure, and so the first thing we see is him failing big. But he doesn't fail in a way that's interesting. He has no panache, no style. He seems neither desperate nor overly sad. His is the most composed suicide scene in any movie ever.
(For example, before strapping himself to the death machine he's built, he packs up a lot of personal items and throws them into the dumpster outside. Why do this? Surely, after you're dead, others will come along and take care of throwing away your crap.)
Like every other character Legolas has ever played (except Legolas), he's incapable of expressing even the most basic of emotions. Dead. Weight.
And then there's Claire, the dumbest and most irritating movie character you're likely to see anywhere for a while.
(When I say dumb, I mean dumb. In the first conversation she has with Drew, she explains that you can tell a lot about someone's personality from their first name! I suppose Crowe thinks this is the kind of charming personal idiosyncracy that gives girls personality, but all I could think about was how you'd be biased based on the particular people you had met with that first name, and how the trick wouldn't work with people like me who had unusual names. Oh, and how this was a stupid conversation.)
Drew winds up staying in Kentucky for weeks because...well, for no good reason, really. Like everything that happens in Elizabethtown, events unfold because they are convenient for Cameron Crowe's filming schedule, not for any reason. Crowe needs to keep Drew in Kentucky long enough to fall in love with the dippy Claire, so he has memorial services and funerals that stretch on for days and days.
And it's not like there's so much great dialogue between the two lovebirds for Crowe to savor, either. The guy always uses a lot of recognizable songs on his soundtracks, but Elizabethtown is filled to bursting with music. The couple falls in love almost exclusively in montage, including a really embarrassing early sequence where they talk all night on the phone while music plays so we can't hear what they're saying.
Every once in a while, we'll get a little snippet of conversation. (Like, seriously, "men see the world as a box and women see the world as a round room." Ooooohhhh...Kirsten Dunst, you just blew my mind). Then, in the next scene, they're in love!
Aside from the fact that they have no chemistry, and that the Kirsten Dunst character is extremely annoying and just talks shit constantly, much of the rest of the film doesn't make any sense. How does Claire always know when Drew will be around where he will be, and how does she keep getting days off to do nothing but dick around with him? Who gives a shit about Drew's cousin (Paul Schneider) and his stupid son, who we spend time getting to know and are then totally dropped by the film? And why is this girl Claire, who is clearly attractive and, in the reality of the movie, irresistably charming to everyone she encounters, all alone in the world and obsessively trying to get this dull, suicidal shoe designer to fall in love with her?
But when I said Cameron Crowe has lost his mind, I didn't just mean he made a seriously bad film. I mean that the entire film is bursting to overflow with bad ideas, like Sarandon's funeral service "boner"-obsessed stand-up act, or the use of Tom Petty's "Learning to Fly" on the soundtrack, or the scene where Drew twirls around by himself in the woods as an expression of his freedom or joie de vivre or some shit.
And that's just it...After watching 2 hours of this film, I have no idea what Crowe was going for. He sets up a lot of dramatic scenarios and a lot of potential themes - a young man with no real identity meeting his large colorful Southern family, a disconnected son getting to know his dead father and harried mother all over again, a sudden and strange new romance, coming to grips with failure, learning to accept responsibility, daring to experiment and take rists. It sets up all these ideas, but doesn't bother to do anything with them. They all just float around, and I guess when Crowe plays soft Elliott Smith songs and shows Kirsten Dunst looking around in slo-mo, we're supposed to reflect on all of them, quietly, to ourselves.
Also, the last 15 minutes or so of Elizabethtown classifies its author as certifiably insane.
SPOILERS - I will now talk about the end of the film Elizabethtown. Read no further if you watch romantic comedies in suspense as to how they will end.
Okay, so at the end, Claire gets Drew to agree to drive, by himself, back to Oregon from Kentucky. Oh, yeah, and he brings his dad's ashes with him, and scatters them wherever this crazy idiot tells him to.
She draws him up a personalized map with exact directions and CD's timed perfectly to accompany his journey. As if that's not obsessive-compulsive enough, she has also included photographs of herself at all of these various locales. Oh, and on the CD's that are timed to his experiences, she sometimes includes her own voice.
"This is the motel where Martin Luther King was shot...His death was just the beginning of his victory."
I swear, this is in the movie. This is insane. Anyone who would even think of this idea, and then think it was a really cute, sweet way to end a romantic comedy, is nutso. Can you imagine if someone really did that? Recorded themselves on a series of CD's to accompany you and your dead father's remains on a cross-country journey.
"Hey, Orlando Bloom. How are you and the ashes today? We're going to see a lot of exciting attractions..."
Creeeeeeepy.
In one final note, near the end of Drew's road trip, Claire arranges to meet up with him and give him a choice about being with her romantically. This means she arranged to get herself from Kentucky to this random spot on the road to Oregon at the precise moment that Drew would pull up in his car, and that he would definitely find all this expended effort charming and delightfully romantic. Right.
It's just bizarre, like some sort of alternate-reality rom-com version of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Bloom crying and yelling at his Dad's ashes while listening to Kirsten Dunst DJ blues albums and recommend good spots to stop in Tennessee for chili. I think Cameron needs some lithium.
