Elizabethtown

Elizabethtown comes across as a metaphor for Cameron Crowe’s film-making. He struck gold with Jerry Maguire, then had a generally favourable critical response to Almost Famous, and then he re-made Vanilla Sky (first done as a Spanish arthouse film), a perverse, dull exercise, a typical Hollywood, bad taste re-imagining of good indie European fare, which led to a critical and commercial trashing.

So he came to Elizabethtown much like the main character in his show, here played by Orlando Bloom, who is a golden haired boy designer of sports shoes, who is about to cost his boss Alec Baldwin close on a billion dollars by designing a shoe universally reviled as a turkey.

Let’s not mind that the shoe is given a silly name, and doesn’t look like a state of the art effort at shoe design and anyone who sent a crap shoe like this out into the marketplace without proper testing deserves exactly the same fate as classic Coke. Let’s just go with the flow, and follow the hapless designer, as people start to give him ‘last looks’ and he learns to decode them, and then he hears his dad has just died while on a visit to his roots in ol’ Kentucky.

His frantic mum (Susan Sarandon) refuses to head across to handle matters – instead she goes into a frenzy of new age activities, including learning to cook and learning to tap dance and trying her hand at stand up comedy. So we join Bloom on a virtually deserted plane as he heads to Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

Lordy, lordy, who should be on the plane but flight attendant Kirstin Dunst, the thinking man’s squeeze, and while explaining how to pronounce Louisville, she flings herself at Bloom. She then has to spend the rest of the movie repeating this action – a really hard call for any actress – while Bloom dillies and dallies and thinks about a first kiss and a first bedding, and maybe even love (but being sentimental, it’s also chaste, so expect no flesh in this outing).

When in Elizabethtown, Crowe runs through a set of familiar riffs about small town ways, and extended family and get togethers, with tensions expressed via talk of Sarandon having lured their home town boy away to California (for 18 months, with the rest of their time spent in Oregon). Ditto, there’s tension between the Californians and the Kentuckians on the matter of burning the body, with Sarandon insisting on cremation, the others wanting the body to go into the family plot, and Bloom doing a bit of a flip flop, just like he flip flops on most other things.

There’s also a cuz who just wanted to be a drummer in a rock ‘n roll band (to the disapproval of his dad, who also disapproves of his parenting skills), and a wedding going down in the hotel where Bloom decides to stay. Meantime, Dunst gives up a flight to Hawaii, so she has plenty of time to chase Bloom.

It’s all evocative enough in its own fish out of water way, but Crowe is inclined to be maudlin, sentimental and metaphysical whenever he’s given half a chance, and the trouble with that is by half way through you’ve lost any interest in the Bloom/Dunst affair, and you couldn’t care less about the family turmoil or the death of the dad. And when you’ve got this kind of emotional disconnect in a show, it’s hard to stay tuned as the show begins its build to near on a two hour running time.

Things get even stickier as the third act kicks into gear – Sarandon turns up for an unlikely star routine, the sort of thing it looks like Crowe wrote into his script to persuade her to turn up for the gig. And a flaming flying bird interrupts the rock band reunion at the wake, and the coffin sticks as it slides into the ground. And Dunst persuades Bloom to drive back home while listening to music. You’d almost swear that after Vanilla Sky Crowe drove himself across America soothing the pain by looking at the sights and playing music to himself while he did his own version of a road movie.

And that brings up another cause for discontent. Crowe loves music, no secret that, but he litters the soundtrack with all kinds of songs (by many good artists). Unfortunately this blurs many emotional moments, and as a new track begins to fade up you know you’re in for either a lyrical or an emotional moment, or maybe have a guitar gently pick away under a full on exchange of deep emotional and philosophical views. It’s a device which ruins many moments, as the music is often more listenable than the drama is effective.

Back in the old sexist days of film criticism, this might have been labelled a chick flick, but the tone – where the girl dotes on the boy – is actually much more male fantasy, in which the male gives permission to the girl to adore him, and she goes out of her way to do just that. It’s a strange kind of healing but handy if you’ve just designed a really bad shoe with a really silly name, and wondered why you’ve lost a billion. It also allows way too much screen time brooding about why fame and success are so transient and meaningless.

In the end, the Kentuckians are right. The family, and the show, are straight out of California and it shows. The crass amongst us might have preferred Crowe to indulge in a little humor along the way instead of the lumpen sentimental kind on offer here. Then we might have got a cat pissing in the spilled ashes instead of lyrical music while Bloom spreads his dad’s ashes around America.

Anyway, word of mouth spoke, and the audiences stayed away, and the critics were unkind, and now it’s out on DVD but I didn’t check the extras because you only want to spend so much time in the company of a bad film. Watch it at your peril, and be prepared to indulge an indulgence, and then you might walk away feeling happy.

The upside is that Tom Cruise was one of the executive producers, proving that Scientology doesn’t help pick winners, and the downside is that there’s an awful lot of talent here floundering along with Crowe. Dunst and Bloom, though miscast for what’s asked of them, struggle along with real engagement, as do the rest of the cast, though it’s hard not to join Republican right wingers in wishing a dire fate for Susan Sarandon. For once being a penniless hillbilly in Elizabethtown seems a better fate than embracing flip flop Californian despair and existential hippy angst. The world’s gone way past The Big Chill.

Hey, it’s the movie business, mixed with rock’n roll. Lghten up, and spare us the homages to music in Memphis. One two and half minute blues song generally can do more for your mental health than the entire near two hours of this show. As they say in the church of the Thetans, here endeth the rant.

 

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