Just before a preview screening of director Cameron Crowe's romantic comedy Elizabethtown flashed on screen, a film critic in the audience pointed out that the movie was 20 minutes shorter than the version screened just weeks earlier at the Toronto Film Festival.
Nearly two hours later, as Elizabethtown wound down -- and very slowly at that -- I thought it would have been even better if they'd cut another 55 minutes.
Despite its rousing and very amusing first 20 minutes or so, Elizabethtown quickly sinks into outlandishness with unbelievable characters and events played out against a big family funeral. Hard to believe that Crowe is the same person who guided Jerry Maguire to romantic comedy gold. Worse, as it goes along, Elizabethtown slows to a crawl. It gets caught in a whirlpool of silly repetitiveness that's only broken near the end by an interminable journey of self-discovery for major character Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom).
Things are much more promising when we're introduced to Drew at the start, when the film is a fast and funny study of corporate doom. Drew is a hot-shot boy-wonder shoe designer who has created the Edsel of sport shoes, a 21st-century design for an improbable looking piece of footwear that has turned into a nearly $1-billion failure for his company. Improbable as the shoe looks, it wears an even more unlikely name -- the Spasmotica.
Crowe has staged a hilarious sequence in which Drew is shunned by everyone in the company while on his way to meet his simmering boss Phil (Alec Baldwin in a funny hold-back-the-anger performance).
It's no wonder after this personal comedown that Drew designs his suicide, and in a very original and clever way. But just as a knife is about to plunge into Drew's chest, his distraught sister phones to report that their father has just died unexpectedly while visiting kinfolk in Elizabethtown, Ky. Drew, now the "man" of the family, has been selected to travel from Oregon to Kentucky to prepare funeral arrangements, which include -- at the urgings of his mother and sister who plan to remain in Oregon -- cremation.
On a red-eye flight from Portland to Louisville where he seems to be the only passenger, he's befriended (though "accosted" is more like it) by chatty flight attendant Claire (Kirsten Dunst). A perky, pesky, overly helpful young woman, she gives Drew the complicated directions to Elizabethtown . . . and her phone number.
Dunst comes on so strong that she outstays her welcome for both us and Drew in about five minutes. That he will call her, however, is a given. That she will turn up on the fringes of his life for most of the rest of the movie is a problem. She seems, after a short while, to be a stalker.
Dunst, an actress I usally applaud, here is simply annoying. Part of it is the way she has been written by Crowe, with so much cute whimsy and assured smarts that she's unbelievable as a human being. "I can't help helping," she insists as she pushes her way into Drew's life, trying to rearrange things. It's also unbelievable that he'd take to her, although most of the time he's so tangled in self-pity and family crises that he's clueless when it comes to Claire's true feelings.
Alas, there's no chemistry between Dunst and Bloom, a charmless actor who inexplicably keeps getting star roles. And there goes the movie.
Crowe's insightful and amusing views of family life -- complete with dysfunctional characters and opinionated relatives who are horrified by the thought of cremation -- lift the film. But it's not long before the same arguments and situations are repeated again and again, and Elizabethtown looks as though it has no place to go.
A daffy wedding party that has taken over the rest of Drew's hotel floor seems manufactured and silly. So, too, are the wacky flights of fancy by Drew's mother (Susan Sarandon) who, in four days, tries to fix her car, learn organic cooking, fix the toilet and take tap-dancing lessons, all while trying to put her husband's death out of her mind. What? A scene in which she tap dances, very tentatively, at her husband's memorial service is embarrassing as is most of the service itself, played like a stand-up comedy routine. But it's just the warmup to a fiery finale that's played for laughs but will look in very bad taste in Rhode Island, given the Station nightclub disaster.
As with his Oscar-winning semi-autobiographical script for Almost Famous, about a teenage writer who follows a band around for Rolling Stone magazine much as Crowe once did, Elizabethtown was inspired by Crowe's reaction to the unexpected death of his father. The scenes between Bloom and his father's corpse are very poignant.
But by the time the film rambles on and on in Drew's interminable sentimental journey of self-discovery as he travels to both kitschy sites and places associated with America's tragic history -- in a trip laid out by the inevitable Claire (when could she have possibly found the time?) -- nearly all good will is lost. Rather than approaching the status of Jerry Maguire, Crowe winds up with a film that's as clunky as his Vanilla Sky.
**
Elizabethtown
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Bruce McGill, Judy Greer.
Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes, brief profanity.
ARTICLE TOOLS: 
