Review

Review Date: 16-October-05
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Junk

Elizabethtown (2005)

Let's face facts: Orlando Bloom is beautiful. I mean truly, quintessentially beautiful, like a work of art the contemplation of which allows you to see beyond Earth's dusty pallor to a higher plane. It's saying a lot, therefore, to admit that a movie fails despite mining heretofore unexplored depths of Bloom's brown-eyed soul. But there's no getting around this fact either: Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown" is a messy and tedious clunker.

In his first (major) contemporary picture, Bloom plays Drew Baylor, a shoe designer for a Nike-esque company whose father dies just as his career falls apart. On his way to retrieve the body, Drew meets a perky flight attendant (Kirsten Dunst) in a chance encounter of the kind that only happens in romantic movies. After he arrives in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, he also meets a clan of quirky relatives of the sort only found in satirical but heartwarming films about the South. There follows a stretch of loosely connected scenes in which Drew reaches out to Claire, family, friends, and strangers with the awkwardness of the spiritually vacant, commercially saturated American male. (Playing uncle to his cousin's son, bonding with a guy in a hotel room over reality and cold beer, etc.) It's all meant to be funny and perceptive and touching, I know, but it's absurd and sketchy and fatiguing instead.

The movie really becomes unbearable when Drew wraps up his visit at the memorial service, an appallingly eccentric affair where all that's missing is guests throwing pies. (His mother's contribution would be nothing but embarrassing if it weren't delivered by Susan Sarandon in a prolonged cameo.) Finally, he heads home to Oregon on a route mapped out by Claire (the better to accommodate one of Crowe's famous soundtracks), and, again, it's saying a lot when a filmmaker takes a thing of beauty like a road trip and makes you pray it will only end soon. (What the hell does Martin Luther King have to do with it?)

Crowe has captured the wistful texture of fumbling youth in films like "Say Anything ..." and "Almost Famous," but here he doesn't make the characters or relationships gel. With evident strain, he merely unloads a simplistic world in which a man seconds away from suicide finds the answers he needs in the most dubious situations and the most tenuous interactions. There's no wisdom in the drama; no spontaneity in the humor; no suitable context for appreciating the beauty of the leading man. In short, there's no reason to go to "Elizabethtown" at all.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.