..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Elizabethtown

Directed by Cameron Crowe
Paramount Pictures

Watching Elizabethtown was a deeply emotional experience for me. You see, I quite like Cameron Crowe’s work. He is a wonderful filmmaker. And Elizabethtown has all the qualities not of a simple misfire, but of an outright jumping of the directorial shark.

I believe that some directors are, essentially, directors. A guy like Frances Coppola seems to internalize his films before spewing them out, but he has also shown himself completely capable of just directing a movie that is less personal. Soderbergh is in that realm, his misfire here with Bubble an indication of an urge to experiment more than of a career crisis.

But Cameron Crowe is in that camp with Oliver Stone and Woody Allen who are connected in some deep way to their material, their films evolving with their lives... and also running out of steam when they have said all they had to say. Word is that Allen’s Match Point is quite an excellent out-of-genre film. But you get my meaning.

Elizabethtown is the first time we’ve glimpsed Cameron Crowe doing Cameron Crowe.

The comparison of this film to Garden State is specious and insulting. Garden State combined Crowe-isms and Swedish comedy to evolve into its own unique mediocrity. Like Garden State or not, Zach Braff cannot carry Crowe’s jock. Which is why it is all the more horrifying to say that I understand what those comparisons are about. Because if Garden State is a Cameron Crowe imitation, Elizabethtown is one as well... and without the added sparks that Braff brought to his film.

The film misfires in virtually every way. It opens with a faux Jerry Maguire section that feels like we’ve seen it before – complete with company girlfriend who leaves when things go bad – that sets up a whole story about a terrible public humiliation to come... which is neither explained nor examined nor much referred to after the first 20 minutes. I don’t think I’m giving too much away to tell you that the disaster is a running shoe... and why is it a fiasco? Don’t know. Didn’t tell.

When Orlando Bloom’s character finds out that his father is dead, he heads back to Elizabethtown, but his mother and sister’s choice to stay in Seattle is murky at best.

And then you have the empty economy section on a commercial airline... the free upgrade to first class, though that section is somewhat abandoned too... and the wacky stewardess who is classically Crowe-spunky, but unlike Crowe, she is never terribly believable as a character.

As things move along, the film is not unlike Red Eye... everything that happens sets up a gag of no substance. But in Red Eye’s 75 minutes, you expect it all to be thin and senseless. Not so with an emotional drama from Cameron Crowe featuring a dead father, a riff between the folks back home and the mother, and a nightmarish public humiliation due at any moment. (How the shoe can be such a disaster and not be publicized for a week – an absolute movie contrivance of 50s era simplemindedness – is beyond me.)

One sits there, just waiting and waiting for a Cameron Crowe movie to emerge from the wreckage. But it never does. The music cues are not surprising, they are cliché, albeit the cliché was essentially created by Crowe himself many movies ago.

And those magical moments that survive in memory from the weakest of Crowe’s works are simply nowhere to be found. He tries to bring them to life, but they just sit there. There is a “falling in love on cell phones” sequence that never finds its wings. And it is painful after a while because you so want to love and embrace it. But the child is cold.

The performances are a mixed bag. Some people will like different performances, some won’t like any. But Orlando Bloom, who I think is a movie star, is not this movie star. The role demands curveballs and sliders and Bloom is all fastballs down the middle. As for Ms. Dunst... this role is nearly impossible and her endlessly perky take on it is often hard to take. There is little wrong with Ms. Sarandon’s work... except the script she is trying to make sense of... a script that has traveled just past the lip of good, turning quirky into weird and unappealing.

I just sat there, trying to figure out what went wrong. And I only wish I came up with a better answer, as this one hurts to my core. When greatness fades, it is an ugly light indeed.

- David Poland