Elizabethtown

(Paramount Pictures/UIP)

Stars Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Judy Greer, Jessica Beil and Alec Baldwin.
Dear Cameron Crowe, if you ever decide to make another autobiographical piece about yourself, can you please not talk about yourself and concentrate on the other people in your life, because they are interesting. Regards “Der-Fred”. P.S. do not recast Orlando Bloom.

Bloom plays Drew, someone who has just caused the shoe company he works for to lose $972m. He gets “supposedly” fired; so he goes home to kill himself. Upon doing the actual act, his sister calls to inform him that his father has died. He gets sent to collect his father’s ashes where his father died and grew up, Elizabethtown, Kentucky. On the flight over he meets Clare (Kirsten Dunst). At first she annoyingly helps him with directions to get to Elizabethtown. Once there we meet a bunch of ignorant townsfolk who idolize his father and do not believe in cremation. That night, he calls Clare and they hit it off.

After the euphoria of negativity from the “Toronto Film Festival” for being overlong (3 hours), so Cameron Crowe went on a film cutting exercise. An interesting premises it maybe but Elizabethtown goes around in circles and circles but never arrives at its destination. Bloom is an extremely annoying actor to watch. He doesn’t have the capacity to handle a lead role, especially one like this. Dunst is a welcome site. She has had more experience and it does show. All the supporting actors are vastly underused. Sarandon, Greer and Baldwin have all the good (although minor) parts and are great to watch. Sarandon does have a ten minute speech in there somewhere, however her composure and finesse makes this rather enjoyable and funny. From an audience point of view, it would have been better to juice out a few of the storylines involving Sarandon’s character. The last 30 minutes feel like an episode of The Amazing Race. Crowe also overdoes the use of music. There is a lot of it. At first its enjoyable, but then its like, ‘are you going to tell the story’.

The film is too annoying to be sentimental as well. And with tepid acting from Bloom, who is in every scene, it’s hard to enjoy this film. For what its worth, this is a decent film for a male to see, as the father/son relationship is a rather interesting point and a touching aspect but ultimately, the film is a pointless exercise about Crowe’s life.


out of ten

Reviewed by Dino White

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