Susan Granger’s review of “Elizabethtown” (Paramount Pictures)
“There’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco,” explains Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom). “Failure is the nonpresence of success. A fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.” For talented writer/director Cameron Crowe, “Elizabethtown” is, perhaps, a failure but certainly not a fiasco.
Hot-shot footwear designer Drew Baylor has not only lost his job but, according to his boss (Alec Baldwin), he’s also singlehandedly ruined Seattle’s Mercury Shoe Company. While reeling from that catastrophe, he’s told that his father suddenly died while visiting kinfolk in Kentucky. As the older child and only son, his distraught mother (Susan Sarandon) sends him to retrieve the body in Elizabethtown. On the red-eye flight, he encounters Claire (Kirsten Dunst), a perky if persistent flight attendant, who is determined that he will not live the rest of his life without her.
Haphazardly mixing comical, if superfluous and stereotypical, family situations with witty dialogue and tender, romantic moments, Cameron Crowe loses the focus that distinguished previous films, including “Almost Famous” and “Jerry Maguire.” On the other hand, Crowe, formerly a rock journalist, adroitly uses pop music to evoke emotions and propel the story, which emerges as a bittersweet homage to small-town Americana and his own father who died in 1989.
Perpetually detached, Orlando Bloom (“Kingdom of Heaven”) never seems to grasp his essentially passive character, a morose fellow to whom things somehow happen, while dewy Kirsten Dunst (“Spiderman”) plunges past aggressively annoying to emerge enchanting. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Elizabethtown” is a sporadically clever, somewhat surreal 6, culminating with a rambling, disjointed road trip that begs the question: are we there yet?
