Review of Elizabethtown (2005) by Kylie P — 23 Jan 2010

From May 3, 2006:

A movie with dreamy Orlando Bloom, perky Kirsten Dunst, venerable Susan Sarandon, and king of romance spinning yarns set to great music director Camerown Crowe? How can this go wrong?

First of all, dreamy Orlando should work harder on his American accent. And Kirsten Dunst should work harder on her Kentuckian accent.

Those are small gripes. The bottom line is that this plot, when it actually manages to connect in places, has been done before, including by Crowe himself.

Did Cameron mean for this to flow like a zigzag stream of consciousness because that's what it felt like. Orlando plays Drew, a colossal failure in shoe design, he just finds out, who loses his job. He also loses his father, a man he barely knew thanks to his high hopes for success.

The movie first seems to be about living life despite setbacks, and it ends with that feeling too, but the whole of the middle is something else entirely. You see him fail, get fired by Alec Baldwin (ouch), and contemplate suicide or at least a very sharp turn on an exercise bike. Then, he's flying from home to Kentucky to claim his father's remains from his very typically Southern extended relatives, though he meets a unique flight attendant. It then becomes sort of an atypical love story along the lines of Forces of Nature. While he's in Kentucky, though, it's about reconciling his roots with his actual memories, though Kirsten's character keeps popping up. It was just extremely disjointed, and that detracted from the purported emotional resonance. There was no connection to dreamy Orlando's character, and this was supposed to be that character's journey. Sure, Drew takes a road trip in the end, and the soundtrack is simply amazing (Cameron Crowe never fails on the soundtracks to his movies), but everything else feels empty and forced, right down to dreamy Orlando's American accent.

Elizabethtown feels like Jerry Maguire without the heart or Say Anything without the passion.