Elizabethtown isn't what's expected

What’s there to say about Cameron Crowe’s latest film that every single critic in the country hasn’t already lamented? Maybe that the film is quite good in that very Crowe way – but it fails in the places where the writer/director most often finds success.

As a huge Cameron Crowe fan, I had eagerly anticipated Elizabethtown, despite its bad reviews. In fact, it was the first of my must-see films for this season (still to come: Rent, Brokeback Mountain, HP4, Chronicles of Narnia, etc.). Everyone said it is too muddled, too whimsical and trying just too hard to make an impression. I just think it had one plot too many.

Crowe is a director renowned for writing the sort of “life crisis” films that resonate with audiences because “they’ve been there.” The hitch is that all of those movies with moments so resonant (the virginity scene in Almost Famous, the boombox in Say Anything, the end of Jerry Maguire) revolve around a simple pattern of a boy either saving or being saved by a girl.

Crowe went a similar route here, with Drew, a youthful shoe design prodigy, whose 8-year-long project culminates in a financial fiasco, driving him to suicide. He is interrupted in this very creative attempt by a phone call heralding the death of his father. As you can guess, he meets a girl who tries to push her way into his heart with her disturbing cuteness and make shim want to live. Sound familiar? It should, because Zach Braff beat Crowe to the punch with last year’s Garden State.

It’s an also ran plot that I couldn’t just never buy. But it’s the other plot that kept me watching, waiting and eventually weeping. So let’s forget Kirsten Dunst’s entire existence in this film (not that she wasn’t good as the psycho-but-cute flight attendant, Claire) and focus on that.

Elizabethtown at its heart is a movie for anyone that ever left home without ever getting to know their parents as adults.

Because his father, Mitch, dies on a trip to his hometown of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Drew must make a pilgrimage of sorts to collect his father’s remains and return them to his mother (Susan Sarandon) on the West Coast. It starts as a typical fish-out-of-water as the city slicker Drew is tossed headfirst into a town where whoever isn’t family loved his father as if they were.

It is here that Drew finds out that Mitchell was a man who was special to a great many people. That he was more than just his father or his mother’s husband…that everyone has a version of Mitch that they hold onto and believe to be the real deal. He realizes that despite phone calls and hazy childhood memories, he doesn’t know his father at all.

In fact, Drew and Mitch’s inexplicable distance is replicated in the form of his Uncle Dale (Loudon Wainwright), his son Jessie and his grandson Samson. Jessie is a failed musician (who once played in a band that once played in the same vicinity as Skynrd) raising a wild son without boundaries and without rules, much to his father’s disapproval. Dale doesn’t realize how important Jessie’s failed dreams are – and that Jessie is trying in some way to make up for their distance by raising his own son as a buddy instead of a father. In a spectacle that really can’t be described in words, father, son and grandson come together in an understanding that will make you never, ever hear “Freebird” the same way again.

But anyway - amidst all of this family hoopla, a budding romance and a cross-country road trip, Drew projects empty shock. Orlando Bloom (in his first believable adult role) so perfectly captures a guy who actually doesn’t feel anything (but comes very close a few times) – making his family and the audience wait for the inevitable moment when It Hits Him.

When Drew finally discovers that maybe those missed holidays spend working on a stupid shoe was time lost with his father – it is that patented Perfect Realization (set to perfect music, shot in a perfect fashion) that finally Puts You There.

And putting you there is what Crowe does best. And he did it again – you just have to wait for it. And I promise you that as soon as the credits roll, you’ll want to go right home and call your parents – not out of guilt, but out of fear.