2008 Woodie Awards
Crowe Misses a Beat in Elizabethtown
Christopher Erat
Issue date: 11/7/05 Section: Entertainment
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What can I say about Elizabethtown except that it is not your average movie, but then again what can you expect from director Cameron Crowe, who also directed Almost Famous. This movie is very unique and different. Original would be the best word to describe it, but I did not expect it to be that different.I hated the movie in the beginning and thought it was very weird. It got better in the middle towards the end though.
Drew Baylor is a guy we easily feel sorry for, a character played well by Orlando Bloom, who is fired after the company loses a $972 million deal with shoes that turned out to be a failure. He becomes suicidal and attempts to kill himself but postpones it after hearing that his father has died visiting his home town in Kentucky. Now Drew must go home to Elizabethtown to bring his father's body back for cremation.
Kirsten Dunst, who plays Claire Colburn, is a flight attendant whom Drew meets on his way to Kentucky. She is very ditzy and perky, but she gets better towards the middle. She even has this little quirk of taking a picture with her empty hands and making the click sound as she pretends to take a picture of Drew at a few times in the movie. Later on, she seems normal when she and Drew have an extremely long conversation with each other on their cell phones. They decide to meet each other half way to see the sun rise, since they have been on the phone all night, but sparks do not fly between them when they meet up. They even say they reached their peaks on the phone, and I definitely agreed. It was a romance that you knew would not happen. Kirsten Dunst acts more as a hero for him than a girlfriend and aims to make him see his life in a different way. She teaches him that it is okay to fail and that if he fails, he should fail big, but move on. Claire says, "This is your life; let's do something interesting with it."
Fortunately, there were a few good parts having to do with romance and sentimentality. However, this movie lacked the parts that are heart warming, uplifting and moving. I thought it was going to be similar to Big Fish, although more realistic, but this movie is anything but real and lacks the father-son bond that one normally expects. Drew realizes he never really knew his father and was not even there at the dinner table when his father last was. There is the part where Drew is in the car on the road trip and looks at the urn full of his father's ashes and says,"We should have taken this trip years ago." That is a nice touch.
Drew Baylor is a guy we easily feel sorry for, a character played well by Orlando Bloom, who is fired after the company loses a $972 million deal with shoes that turned out to be a failure. He becomes suicidal and attempts to kill himself but postpones it after hearing that his father has died visiting his home town in Kentucky. Now Drew must go home to Elizabethtown to bring his father's body back for cremation.
Kirsten Dunst, who plays Claire Colburn, is a flight attendant whom Drew meets on his way to Kentucky. She is very ditzy and perky, but she gets better towards the middle. She even has this little quirk of taking a picture with her empty hands and making the click sound as she pretends to take a picture of Drew at a few times in the movie. Later on, she seems normal when she and Drew have an extremely long conversation with each other on their cell phones. They decide to meet each other half way to see the sun rise, since they have been on the phone all night, but sparks do not fly between them when they meet up. They even say they reached their peaks on the phone, and I definitely agreed. It was a romance that you knew would not happen. Kirsten Dunst acts more as a hero for him than a girlfriend and aims to make him see his life in a different way. She teaches him that it is okay to fail and that if he fails, he should fail big, but move on. Claire says, "This is your life; let's do something interesting with it."
Fortunately, there were a few good parts having to do with romance and sentimentality. However, this movie lacked the parts that are heart warming, uplifting and moving. I thought it was going to be similar to Big Fish, although more realistic, but this movie is anything but real and lacks the father-son bond that one normally expects. Drew realizes he never really knew his father and was not even there at the dinner table when his father last was. There is the part where Drew is in the car on the road trip and looks at the urn full of his father's ashes and says,"We should have taken this trip years ago." That is a nice touch.