Tuesday night, I saw an advance screening of Cameron Crowe's latest, Elizabethtown. A fast-enhanced flu, along with the holiday itself, prevented a timely review, but I've still managed to sneak in it under the deadline.
Elizabethtown follows Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) for what has to be the most eventful week in his life. Baylor works for a barely-disguised Nike (the CEO's name is Phil, and the company is based in Oregon). He is, apparently, a shoe designer who is personally responsible for a $972 million fiasco called the "Spasmodica," feted at the company, ignored by the public. After falling on his sword figuratively for a business magazine article, Drew heads back to his apartment to fall on a kitchen knife and end it all.
No, the cell phone ringing is not a call from his girlfriend, but from his sister, to let him know that his father had died on a trip back to his home, Elizabethtown, KY. Drew's job is to fly to Kentucky, pick up the ashes, and bring them home. His father's hometown, and a borderline-crazy airline attendant, Clair Colburn (Kirsten Dunst), have other ideas.
The story idea is appealing. A little reminiscent of Garden State, but without the medication. This part of the film is autobiographical for Crowe, and his affection for this side of his family, and the country, shows. Crowe avoids making fun of small-town, borderline-southern society, while still managing to present them as human.
The chemistry between Bloom and Dunst is unmistakeable. The two actors are likeable on their own, and they work well together here. Claire is clearly a little nuts, but not dangerously so, and she knows enough not to push but to lead. Even Claire's detailed scripting of Drew's closing roadtrip is more helpful than overbearing. (The roadtrip is a pleasant ending, but it seemed a little heavy on the politics, and occupies far too central a place in the movie's marketing given its actual length.)
Baylor's Kentucky relatives accept him as he is, knowing he won't be around long. But Drew is still recovering from his shoe-fiasco, so his character is a little too passive to pass judgment, anyway. As a result, there's mercifully little of the Big City vs. the Small-Town South that grates on actual Southerners.
And yet, other interactions don't seem quite right. Susan Sarandon plays Hollie Baylor, Drew's mom, and she reacts to her sudden widowhood with all enough self-absorption that we understand why all the Kentuckians think she lives in California. The stand-up performance she gives at her husband's memorial is so completely out of place, so completely about her and not him, that I found myself wondering exactly why it was supposed to win us over.
There are a few signs of overdirecting, as well. The voice-over at the beginning, as Drew flies in the company helicopter to meet his doom, is pretentious. During a brief montage of Drew remembering his father, we see dad buckling little Drew into the front seat of the car. That's followed, later, by Drew buckling in the urn with his dad's ashes. For some reason, Crowe found it necessary to make the counterpoint explicit by repeating the memory. When Drew drives into town, one of the local stores has a sign thanking the troops, which helps set the scene. Crowe beats in the pro-military contrast with the Left Coast, though, as Uncle Dale presents Drew with his father's West Point ring.
I've more or less given up on Hollywood understanding anything at all about business, but the failures here are worth noticing. No mere shoe designer could possibly cost a Nike almost $1 billion. Companies make mistakes all the time, although I've yet to see Nike's test-marketers blow one this badly. And when New Coke bombed, Coca-Cola fired VPs and directors, not the chemist. I understand Crowe's cinematic need to make Baylor a public failure, but with the dot-com days over, 30-year-old prodigies are usually only given those sorts of budgets in Hollywood.
The question with any film is how much to take as reality, and how much to take as representational. Elizabethtown seems to want to be taken literally, but there's too much that's not real for that to work. And yet, at the end, I left the theater happy about the fate of the characters, which may be more important.
