Film Review |
Almost Human: Elizabethtownby M. Faust |
|
|
“There’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco,” a voice tells us as we watch boxes of sneakers being unloaded from a truck. “A failure is simply the non-presence of success, but a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. It’s a mythic tale that makes other people feel better because it didn’t happen to them.”
Our narrator, a young shoe designer whose latest effort is about to lose the Nike-like company that employs him an amount that is within spitting range of a billion dollars, is speaking of his own experience. In retrospect, though, it’s hard not to apply these words to the man who wrote them, the talented filmmaker Cameron Crowe.
Elizabethtown is not a fiasco, though some might regard it as such. But even after Crowe trimmed 15 minutes from the version he showed at the Toronto and Venice film festivals last month, it is an unequivocal failure, a seemingly endless wallow in whimsical self-indulgence that shows little of the talent Crowe displayed for fashioning appealing, believable characters in films like Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous.
A big part of the problem is that Crowe doesn’t seem to know exactly what film he wanted to make. The original inspiration came from memories of his father, who died in 1989. After the funeral in Kentucky, Crowe spent some time driving through that state and being charmed by it.
Drew (Orlando Bloom, whose slightly off-key American accent is the first of many distractions) takes such a trip at the end of Elizabethtown, giving Crowe a chance to relive his memories, and it’s a nice little travelogue. Problem is, you can’t fashion an entire film out of that.
The bulk of the movie takes place in the titular small Kentucky town. Drew, suicidal after the loss of his job and the guilt at nearly ruining his employer, has come here to retrieve the body of his recently deceased father and return it to Oregon. On the flight over he meets a bubbly stewardess named Claire (Kirstin Dunst). Sensing that Drew’s life is troubled, she takes an interest in him, and he turns to her when dealings with the extended family he barely knows get to be too much.
This sounds like reasonably familiar territory: overworked young man learns the value of life and the true meaning of success in the face of death with the aid of a free spirit (female, of course). Crowe spent a lot of time in the company of Billy Wilder near the end of the great director’s life (by all means read his book Conversations with Wilder), and we sense echoes of Wilder films like Avanti! and The Apartment. (According to the press notes, Crowe had his cast study the latter in detail.)
Any given five or ten minutes of Elizabethtown are likeable, even delightful. But strung end to end they’re a mess. The biggest problem is Dunst. Crowe refers to her character as a “messenger of love.” But Claire is never anything more than a fantasy projection, an angel who exists only to bring Drew back to life. It’s not that female figures like this are rare in movies, but as a rule they don’t occupy much screen time. Claire, however, is in most of the film, and with so little depth her chirpy babbling quickly becomes grating. Nor is the bland Bloom sufficiently interesting to make up for her.
Claire isn’t the only thing about Elizabethtown that is overly detailed but underdeveloped. There are endless details that demand clarification that never comes. How is it possible for one employee to bring down a big company overnight? Doesn’t this place have a marketing department that should have predicted the shoe’s failure well before it was rolled out? What was Drew’s father doing in Kentucky, where everyone acts like he’s been among them all his life? When did Drew’s mother (Susan Sarandon) have time to work up the tapdance routine she performs at the funeral? Given that the film is set over a few days, when did Claire have time to record 42 hours of CDs for his road trip home (a trip she plots out in minute detail)? Why do these young people listen only to music from the 1970s?
I can answer that last one: for the same reason that young people in Woody Allen movies listen to big band singers and Bartok—because they’re the director’s favorites. Before becoming a filmmaker, Crowe was a young music journalist in the 1970s, a career that he recounted in the autobiographical Almost Famous, a film that never got the audience it deserved. With luck, Elizabethtown’s almost inevitable box office failure will indicate to Crowe that he’s sufficiently plumbed his own life and get him back to the craft of creating characters.
|
Issue Navigation> Issue Index > v4n41: Artvoice Goes to China (10/13/05) > Movie Reviews > Almost Human: Elizabethtown This Week's Issue • Artvoice Daily • Artvoice TV • Events Calendar • Classifieds |
Subscribe 