Elizabethtown Review

"Elizabethtown" reviews

Movie

Elizabethtown

Author

anonymous

Date reviewed

2008-11-28 23:11:27

Rating

1.5/5

Provider

CinemaSource

Review

Elizabethtown finds director Cameron Crowe passing off memoirs from his own tragicomedy as a feature-length film. We all know that death is a confusing time, but isn't laughter usually the best remedy? Let's hope, for his sakes, some closure has been reached.

Story

Elizabethtown starts out with Drew (Orlando Bloom) filling us in, voice-over style, on his life (á la Tom Cruise in Crowe's Jerry Maguire). As a once great hotshot shoe designer, Drew just lost his company nearly $1 billion. Yeah, not good. But just before he gives up on life completely, he learns that his dad has died and he has to travel to Elizabethtown, Kentucky (where Crowe's dad was actually from) for the funeral. On his flight, he meets spirited flight attendant Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who tries to tell him a thing or two about Kentucky. When he gets there, he's a fish out of water all right, but who's there to help him with life, love and his distant country bumpkin relatives? You guessed it--Claire, who saves Drew from himself.

Acting

Elizabethtown is, in a way, an Orlando Bloom expose. He finally gets a chance to flex his dramatic muscle in a contemporary setting but, boy, does he have some heavy lifting to do. The Brit occasionally looks all serious, but his American accent is hardly credible--as is the case with most overseas imports. The character he molds is neither here nor there. As his love interest, Dunst fares much better, delivering more spunk than any of the rest of the large cast, save for perhaps Susan Sarandon, as Drew's bereft mother. This could be her best performance to date, partly because she gets to play the endearing quirky girl rather than the hard-to-get variety. The rest of the eccentric cast fill in the blanks nicely.

Direction

A new Cameron Crowe film is usually an exciting thing, since he doesn't make them that often. But in Elizabethtown's case, Crowe misses the mark. Full of flaws and ambiguity, it's a mess, despite a few undeniably warm-and-fuzzy moments. The man can write dialogue, there's no question, and he prides himself on characters that are real and palpable. But when Claire takes her mental pictures she has to motion and say ''click'' to alert the audience to what she's doing. The list goes on. The low point is the end, when a road trip turns Crowe into a DJ, boasting his musical IQ by playing more songs than can fit on the soundtrack. This last-ditch effort is at once pointless, gratuitous and self-indulgent.

Bottom Line

Those who love Cameron Crowe may turn a blind eye to Elizabethtown's self-indulgence. But for others, they might realize the director is stuck in Elizabethtown.

Movie

ELIZABETHTOWN

Author

anonymous

Date reviewed

2005-10-31 16:30:46

Provider

Review

When you think of director Cameron Crowe you think Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous. You don't think "tone-deaf" and "interminable", but those were just two of the criticisms aimed at Elizabethtown after it was shown at the Toronto Film festival as a 'work in progress' film. Re-introducing the rom-com genre with Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, two acclaimed young stars taking the baton from previous stars.

Loosely based on Crowe's own history, it features Bloom as Drew Baylor, a good guy whose innovative running shoe design fails to ignite the sports world, just as he's most in need of a boost after coping with the death of his father. On the way to reclaiming the body he meets Claire, a young, sweet, optimistic air stewardess (Dunst). This nostalgic film shows Drew discovering what his dad was all about and what made him tick, while inevitably falling in love with Dunst's flight attendant (well, who wouldn't?). Susan Sarandon is brilliant as Drew's mother, dealing with her grief by tap dancing.

Crowe's tried-and-tested method of jogging memories through music works as well as it has in the past, but you begin to wonder if he knew what direction to take or when to shout "cut" in this cute, overly romantic offering. The awkward romance between Bloom and Dunst doesn't quite convince either in an ultimately disappointing film that yearns for some of those qualities of charm and unpredictability that Crowe has delivered in the past.