Elizabethtown

I remember seeing the trailer for Elizabethtown in a theater and smiling.  Cameron Crowe was back.  He was coming off Vanilla Sky, which was a decent film, but he'd also just done Almost Famous, which is one of my favorite films.   I had high hopes for Elizabethtown.

Then I saw Elizabethtown.

I wasn't sure what to feel.  I mean, a Cameron Crowe film always makes me happy.  Say Anything was fulfilling.  Almost Famous was astonishing.  Vanilla Sky was complicated and uneven, but nobody's ever used R.E.M. any better.

Elizabethtown sort of left me feeling...incomplete.

Don't get me wrong — there's astounding material here.  Cameron Crowe takes his keenly observant character studies and ear for dialogue and music to rural Kentucky, where my dad's side of the family comes from, and Crowe even insists on the correct pronunciation of "Louisville."  He contemplates fatherhood, shows generations changing hands, and does this amazing montage of a construction worker named Rusty blowing up a termite-infested house.  (You just have to see that.)  In short, Cameron Crowe basically threw a film right into my emotional wheelhouse.

This film should be perfect.  I want this film to be perfect.

The soundtrack, as with all Cameron Crowe films, is perfect — a combination of contemporary and classic rock — Patty Griffin, Ryan Adams, and My Morning Jacket sit beside U2, Tom Petty, Elton John, and Lindsay Buckingham.  Every time he uses a song and an image at the same time, I hear my own record collection and I see pretty much what I'd do with the same song if I made a film.  If Cameron Crowe keeps making movies, I'll never have to get up.

Crowe chose so much music for the film, the soundtrack spans three discs, including a rare-ish EP called "Songs from the Brown Hotel," which features a My Morning Jacket song called "I Will Be There When You Die."  I'm not a big MMJ fan, but I love that song.  There are no fewer than three great Tom Petty songs here, and Patty Griffin even shows up.  You can't complain about this music.  Nobody does soundtracks better.

There are so many brilliant moments — Alec Baldwin's character, for example, steals the opening of the film, and his lines pop up here and there throughout.  Much of the film takes place in Kentucky, and most of those parts work.  I'm even talking about the world's longest cell phone call, which is by turns romantic and exhilarating.  There is nothing — nothing — like an all-night phone call.

The Kentuckians I know aren't quite this eccentric, but whatever. 

Gailard Sartain — the venerable character actor — plays a mortician.  Sartain was a regular sighting on "Hee Haw" when I was growing up.  At my grandpa's house, "Hee Haw" was always on.  Seeing Sartain in this film is sort of comforting.  Grandpa would approve.

Dad's side of the family comes from Kentucky.  I can pick a Kentucky accent out pretty quickly.  Unfortunately, there aren't many real Kentuckians in this film.  Most of the southerners are from Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina, and that's a shame, but nothing I can't get past.

Unfortunately, the script is off, and that's what bothers me.  To create a protagonist, Crowe basically takes Jerry Maguire and Lloyd Dobler, combines them, and puts the character in a shoe company.  During Bloom's moment of disclosure around 1:20, I keep waiting for him to spit out Jerry Maguire's line: "I am cloaked in failure!"

Bloom's character could be anybody; we all lose our fathers someday.  That's an idea worth pursuing in a script.  Why isn't that idea liberating for the writer?  As is, we just have this well-worn, Jerry Maguire framework within which Orlando Bloom operates.

As a love interest, we get another plucky girl in the tradition of Kate Hudson's or Renee Zellweger's or even Penelope Cruz's, and I guess I should expect this by now, but I'd like to see Crowe write a completely different female love interest.  Maybe even flip the gender roles.  Anything to get Kirsten Dunst to stop miming the act of snapping a picture.

Let's just lay everything out.  There's no narrative reason for Bloom's character to feel the way he feels or have the kind of failure he experiences.  Crowe doesn't need this Jerry Maguire stuff to tell this story.  This is a story about Drew going home, reconnecting with his family, reconciling some issues with his deceased father, and reconciling his own failures — but his failures could be any kind of failures.  The subplots with the other characters and their arcs are welcome and refreshing — Susan Sarandon as the panicked widow who doesn't know what to do with herself, so she does...everything.   I don't care about Drew's "shoe fiasco."  I care about these people and how they connect/re-connect.

The method by which Drew attempts to kill himself — taping a huge knife to an exercise machine — is a sight gag that just seems forced.  The comedy isn't as spontaneous as we've seen in Crowe's other films.  The "60B" crap and driving directions and Drew yelling and talking to himself in the car is all just...tepid.  Orlando Bloom is trying here, but he just doesn't have the talent to make weak material look strong.

Does anyone care about athletic shoes?  What if Crowe had taken this another way?  What if Drew were a successful, but arrogant and neglectful of his family, denying his roots, and then his dad died?

(Well, then you might have Garden State.)

All I can think is, this script is one draft away.  I get the feeling Crowe rushed this one.  Rework the opening and the two lead characters and you have a much stronger film.  But that's just one guy's take.  Feel free to start your own blog.

Yet, with all of these complaints, I still can't help but like Elizabethtown.

I see Kirsten Dunst give Orlando Bloom that "unique map" and send him on his road trip, and I hear that shoddy cover band bust out "Free Bird" in the background and start a fire, and I wonder whether I should just let go of all this critical stuff and enjoy the damned film.  I think I will.  Again.

[Side note: Long before my wife and I got married, she took a job in Santa Fe.  I stayed in Indiana.  While she was out there, I sent her a package including a road atlas with all the states and major spots between Indiana and New Mexico marked with little notes, the contents of which are none of your business.  I sort of borrowed that idea from this film.]

Maybe Cameron Crowe was a bit more creative with his 42 hour, 11 minute, music accompanied pilgrimage.  Even if the whole thing is so saccharine and dumb, we get such great music and imagery, I don't even care.  There's "Hard Times" by Eastmountainsouth, a band I discovered before Cameron Crowe.  There's "Pride" by U2, as Drew reaches the Lorraine Motel.  There's a song for so many moments in a Cameron Crowe film, just as there's a song for so many moments in our lives.  I associate music with moments.  I hear songs and I'm right back there all over again.  I'm not the only one.

I could pretty much watch this closing sequence again and again.  I've come a long way with Cameron Crowe's record collection.  I'm still hooked on his films after 20 years or so.

Crowe shot for the moon and hit the roof with Elizabethtown.  The trick for me is being okay with that.  I look at this film and wonder what could have been, but I also see what is right in front of me, and I realize, all over again, how much I love that too.