Elizabethtown

Elizabethtown, originally uploaded by MertWindu.

Elizabethtown
Directed by Cameron Crowe
Starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, and Judy Greer
123 minutes
Rated PG-13

There are two parts to Elizabethtown. There is the first movie, which stands as an average story about a man who is cast adrift by life, and finds a handhold in the places which seem the least likely, but make sense by the end. Then there is the second movie, a 20-minute short that put a smile on my face, and a better grade at the bottom of this review.

Drew Baylor (Bloom) is a designer at a shoe company whose resemblances to Nike are enough to make me want to just call it Nike in this review. We open the movie with Drew returning to the Nike home base, with a nervous, sullen look on his face. He passes his coworkers, who all have the look of prison inmates watching a man who is walking his last walk on death row. Though he tells them all that he's "fine," we know from Bloom's voice over that something terrible has happened. A shoe that Drew designed, which was upposed to be a revolutionary product that would launch notNike into stratospheres previously unheard of in the business world, is a complete and utter flop. Though we don't really know why (Ebert reports in his review of the movie that an original cut had a more fleshed-out storyline for the shoe), but from the brief glimpses of the devil ray-inspired shoe, we get enough of an idea of why it was a bust.

With his career in utter ruin, and his girlfriend Ellen (played by Esquire's newly-crowned Sexiest Woman Alive Jessica Biel) probably getting ready to end things, Drew takes to a suicidal course of action with such nonchalance that we're wondering just how far he'll get before the inevitable second thought. What actually stops Drew from killing himself via a darkly hilarious contraption is a phone call from his sister, letting him know that his father, Mitchell, has just died.

I try, whenever I think about music and movies, not to judge them based on a previous incarnation. But it's pretty tough to avoid mentioning Garden State here. Similar plotline, and even moreso, a very similar disposition on the part of the protagonist, at least at the start of the movie. I say this, because Drew's reaction to his sister's call is not one of shock or pain, but rather frustration that the trip he must make to Kentucky to collect his father's remains will delay his "dark date with destiny." It's more than a little reminiscent of Andrew Largeman's reaction to his father's phone call at the start of Garden State, and I think the director's of the two movies were trying to make the same point about their main characters.

Anyway, Drew flies to Kentucky, and as anyone who has set foot inside a movie theater in the last month knows, he meets a pretty, but very perky flight attendant, Claire (Dunst). She is insistent on meeting Drew, on striking up a conversation with him, and on giving him ultimately false directions from the Louisville (that's Loo-uh-vuhl) airport to Elizabethtown, where Mitchell was visiting with relatives at the time of his death. Claire is a "student of names," and can divine the personality of any person based on their first name. She has never met a nice Ellen, won't trust any Phils, and has never disliked a Mitchell she's ever met. She's quirky, got it?

For the sake of expediency, and also because I'm not trying to ruin the movie for you, let's skip ahead a little. Drew meets up with relatives, finds out the good and bad about each of them, and begins to open up a little. He also has a night-long phone conversation with Claire, which ends in a very real scene where they meet up to see the sunrise, but realize that they were better conversation partners on the phone. Never fear, we're not quite done with Claire. She helps Drew to find some beauty in the life he feels has become worthless because of his catastrophic failure.

Sarandon and Judy Greer, as Drew's mother and sister, are constant presences in the film, though they don't really have any impact until their final apperances, at a huge memorial service for Mitchell attended by friends and family. There, sister Heather is a complete blubbering mess, and mother Hollie is a beautiful, graceful tap dancer whose tribute to her late husband is heart-breaking and heart-mending. IF there is a moral to the first story, it is about the importance of love in life. Love of all kinds. It's a Cameron Crowe movie, so you're going to be able to taste the saccharine on some of the scenes, but it's worth it.

Then, there's the second movie. After the memorial service, Drew fulfills a promise to Claire to drive his way back home in Oregon (she explains why). She gives him the world's most elaborate map and travel guide, and we are in the car with him for a 20-minute journey across the country, where we can finally see what Crowe was driving at. It's a wonderful, happy ending, which would be expected in a movie like this. Look, Lloyd Dobler gets on the plane with Diane Court, William Miller gets a real interview with Russell Hammond, and Jerry Maguire comes home to tell Dorothy she completes him. We know how this one's going to end. How it gets there, though, is fun, a little unexpected, and far deeper than I ever hoped for.

It wouldn't be wholly inaccurate to call Crowe's writing in Elizabethtown a little heavy-handed at times. There are some real groaners in the script. Tame stuff like, "I'm impossible to forget, but I'm hard to remember," spoken by Claire, though it makes sense at the time for her character. But it's Cameron Crowe, so you kind of expect it, and in the world created in Elizabethtown, gritty, subtle dialogue would feel out of place. There are a lot of interesting messages to be had in Elizabethtown, and the most powerful ones come in a cross-country road trip taken by an interesting pair of people. It's a sweet, smart love story, and it's also a good journey movie. But I'll reiterate, the last 20 minutes, the road trip, are what make it a great flick. The movie needs the road trip, but the road trip doesn't need the rest of the movie. Enjoy.

Three stars.