“Elizabethtown” may as well be called “Smug-town,” or “Phony-Baloneyville,” or “What the . . . ? Heights.” It dares you to care about any of its people or incidents or sentiments, foisting the characters’ little comic quirks on the audience like they’re fenced goods. The central couple in writer-director Cameron Crowe’s film is played by Orlando Bloom, wearing a perma-smirk, and Kirsten Dunst, who puts the “oy” in “cloying” as the world’s most aggressively adorable flight attendant. He’s a cipher. She’s maybe meant to disarm, but she’s scarier than anything in “Flightplan.”
Most of Crowe’s previous work has been easy on the eyes and, especially, the ears. A gifted writer at his best, the former rock journalist specializes in capital-D Dialogue and banter that screams out: “A writer wrote this! Not a ‘team’ of ‘collaborators,’ but a single, unfettered writer! And wait–I have more to say on the subject!” His slickest and most lucrative effort to date, “Jerry Maguire,” happens also to be his best.
He’s going for something more personal and idiosyncratic in “Elizabethtown,” which was partly inspired by his own father’s death. Bloom plays Drew Baylor, whose eight-year dream project–the design and launch of an absurd, winged athletic shoe, the Spasmotica–goes up in flames. The shoe turns out to be the Edsel of footwear. Total projected losses to the company: $972 million. “As someone once said, there’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco,” Drew intones in one of several thousand voiceovers.
After an adorable dressing-down from his boss (Alec Baldwin), Drew’s adorable comic suicide attempt is interrupted by news from his sister that their father has died, and Mom (Susan Sarandon) is coping with her loss by diving, adorably, into various projects: learning to cook, learning to fix the toilet, learning to tap dance. Drew travels from Oregon to Elizabethtown, Ky., where his father died while visiting family and friends, in order to collect the body.
Flying en route Drew meets attendant Claire (Dunst), who has an adorable habit of taking pretend-pictures with an invisible camera–she’s an ad for her own invisible camera company–and concocting elaborate maps and directions and consolations for Drew, by whom she is smitten at first sight.
Crowe pits city slicker Drew against his small-town Kentucky aunts and uncles and cousins, as they haggle over funeral arrangements and contribute, bit by bit by bit by bit by bit, to Drew’s understanding of the father he knew, but not well enough. Drew has a secret: Everyone considers him Mr. Big–his entrance into Elizabethtown is no less honorific, although not in the least amusing, than Eddie Bracken’s homecoming in “Hail the Conquering Hero”–yet the tone is gauzy and unearned. The whole film trades on us feeling sorry for Drew, but the man we see, not helped by Bloom’s way of gliding through a scene in a haze of pleasant self-regard, is a rich yutz floating above the petty but adorable travails of his common-folk relations.
It all gets pretty grisly by the time Sarandon’s widow shows up for the Elizabethtown memorial service and performs a tap number to “Moon River.” Funny and sad, together, ineffably, is the idea. But does Crowe realize how callow and self-serving this woman seems, hogging the spotlight at her late husband’s sendoff?
Then, in a long, loooooooong sequence that for all I know may still be going on, Drew embarks on a road trip accompanied by his father’s ashes, a 42-hour journey mapped out in excruciating detail by Claire, who also provides 42 hours’ worth of mix-tape musical accompaniment. (Crowe scores “Elizabethtown” the same way, with reams of nudge-nudge background music telling us how to feel every second.) The route requires Drew to make stops at the Memphis motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, as well as a visit to the Oklahoma City bombing memorial tree. You half-expect Claire’s follow-up instructions to read: “Now, drive to the airport and fly to Hiroshima . . . . “
This scene has been shortened somewhat since the film’s Toronto film festival screening. Sarandon’s eulogy is shorter as well. In all, Crowe cut 18 minutes.
What remains, however, remains the same.
So many romantic comedies come and go without making the slightest impression. “Elizabethtown” is not one of them; I found it galling.
`Elizabethtown’
(star)
Directed by Cameron Crowe; screenplay by Crowe; cinematography by John Toll; production design by Clay A. Griffith; music by Nancy Wilson; edited by David Moritz; produced by Crowe, Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner. A Paramount Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:57.
Drew Baylor …………… Orlando Bloom
Claire Colburn ………… Kirsten Dunst
Hollie Baylor …………. Susan Sarandon
Phil DeVoss …………… Alec Baldwin
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for language and some sexual references)
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mjphillips@tribune.com
