Flight attendants all over the country right now are up in arms about the new Jodie Foster thriller “Flight Plan” for portraying their profession as mean and uncaring, but they are going to have a lot to live up to when they see Kirsten Dunst in “Elizabethtown.”
Dunst plays Claire, a woman who is so full of life and drop dead charming that it is a wonder she’s not beating suitors like Orlando Bloom off with a stick. Instead, she basically throws herself at Drew (Bloom), a failed shoe designer travelling to Kentucky for his father’s funeral.
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| Bad pun alert! Cameron Crowe urns respect again. |
“Elizabethtown” is the new romantic comedy from writer/director Cameron Crowe. Like his previous films “Say Anything,” “Jerry Maguire,” and “Almost Famous,” it is overflowing with fully realized characters, perfect little details that ring true, and iconic moments that will live on in pop culture. Unlike those films, it has a sprawling narrative that could be labeled as unfocused. This is a movie with so much good going for it, though, that the word ragged would be a more apt description.
Everybody knows that road trips don’t begin at the end of a movie, they happen in the middle—but don’t try to tell that to Crowe, a talented writer who uses impossibly warm and funny little moments to bring life’s bigger picture into focus. “Elizabethtown” certainly suffers from stretches of blurriness, but (I think a rock n’ roll analogy is ideal here) so did revered cult rock icons The Replacements. Ask any ‘Mats fan and they’ll tell you that both the band’s brilliant songwriting and stupid-drunk posturing go hand-in-hand. The Replacements were a beautiful chaos, and so is Crowe’s opus, over-extending itself and bursting at the seams with great tunes for every occasion.
Like Jerry Maguire before him, Drew is suffering a total career breakdown. He is a bit more depressed than Jerry, though, and is about to attempt a novel suicide by homemade, knife-wielding exercise bike. From this bumpy attempt at black comedy, the story moves on to a more familiar subject for Crowe—self-examination. It is his father’s untimely death while visiting relatives in Kentucky that stops the pedals and forces Drew to re-organize his priorities. Crowe’s own father died of a heart attack under the same circumstances, and the film was inspired by his own experiences.
Although he’s dead at the beginning of the film, Drew’s father comes alive through the vivid remembrances of the city’s locals, who come together in a wave of love and support. A slew of great character actors from musician Loudon Wainwright III to perpetual minor player Bruce McGill make up the strong family fabric of Elizabethtown. While the town’s colorful citizens are idealized to a certain extent, their seemingly brave exteriors conceal a host of problems. Ever the humanist, Crowe keeps even the nastiest of these characters sympathetic.
Bloom, in his first movie with an American accent, takes a while to fully inhabit Drew. The more comfortable the character gets with himself, the more Bloom seems comfortable in Drew’s shoes. Dunst is at her enchanting best, rattling off Crowe’s patented self-aware and snappy dialogue with ease and keeping Claire from becoming an overly attentive parody. She has the perfect combination of verve and pathos to seem fairly authentic in a romanticized atmosphere.
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| The ‘Mats = Elizabethtown. Think about it. |
Virginia Woolf, in a speech to empower her gender, complained famously once that women in her time existed solely as mirrors to reflect man’s self-esteem. If all women today were as selfless and perceptive as Claire, then men everywhere would need bigger skulls to hold their super-sized egos and be so well-adjusted that their personal therapists would be forced to find new work.
Crowe has a way of celebrating life while putting life’s problems in perspective. It’s easy to get caught too much in the here and now of daily struggles without noticing the life that’s passing you by. It was Tom Keifer of Cinderella who once sang “Don’t Know What You Got (‘Til it’s Gone),” summing up a boatload of clichés in just under four minutes. Cameron Crowe took just over two hours to say basically the same thing, but I’ll gladly spend another two hours bathing in the unlikely rush of reckless poignancy that is “Elizabethtown” before revisiting that once-popular power ballad.
The movie is like one big, messy mix tape anyway, and Crowe’s taste in music is pretty damned interesting most of the time.
In an unusual move for a film that has yet to open, Crowe has already stated that he will be releasing an extended Director’s Cut of “Elizabethtown” on DVD. What then, are we to consider this version that hits theaters today? I, for one, am ready for a longer movie. For a film with such a deep well of rich characters, I look forward to seeing more of underused performances by Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, and Judy Greer. There were scenes in this version that felt abbreviated, and freewheeling narrative be damned, I’m ready for more detail.
For all the criticisms Crowe receives for borrowing so much of legendary director Billy Wilder’s philosophies on movie-making, he should receive equally as many kudos for taking chances on an uneven plot structure, and emphasizing the imprecision of life’s moments over perfect, efficient storytelling.
