Cast: Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Bruce McGill, Judy Greer, Jessica Biel, Paul Schneider

A romantic comedy tinged with seriousness centred on a young man’s father’s funeral, Elizabethtown attempts a great deal but doesn’t quite succeed for a number of reasons. A complex, genre-mixing plot and a problematic characterisation are two of them. One of a few taglines running through it is “If it wasn’t this it’d be something else.”  That part works.

Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) is a wunderkind shoe designer who finds his god is success rather than greatness. His workaholic dedication for the past eight years to the design of a new running shoe eventuates in nothing but a spectacular and much publicised failure costing an obscene amount of money that “could’ve saved the planet”. The pivotal event that will change his life is not this, but news of his father’s sudden death while on a family visit to Kentucky. It literally stops Drew on the brink of suicide and until he discovers how to put things into proportion, he has to put his personal problems on hold to retrieve his father’s body.

Taking the red-eye to Kentucky he meets flight-attendant Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst). She’s the love of his life, though only she knows it and she works extremely hard throughout to convince him they’re two of a kind. “We’re the substitute people,” she says, although she also has to tell him she’s “one of a kind” and later says wistfully, “I’m impossible to forget but hard to remember.” They spend the whole night on the phone talking freely and animatedly until they decide to meet at daybreak only to dwindle into silence. “We peaked on the phone,” she says.

The effect on Drew of this journey back to his father’s home town, to family he doesn’t know, to townsfolk who revere the older man, to discover a father he’s been too busy to get to know, is overwhelming, and he doesn’t notice Claire’s self-nominated mission to change his life direction. Claire is there at every important time – such as when choosing the urn for his father’s ashes, despite his father’s family‘s insistence on burial. Like a female embodiment of cupid’s arrow she targets him from the first moments on the plane when she draws him a map of his route to Elizabethtown from Louisville (and instructs him that the correct pronunciation of Louisville is Lou-a-vull). Her insistence on literally changing his direction manifests in the second half of the movie in an even more elaborately detailed road-map, with music and commentary on tape, that she somehow finds time to put together for his long-delayed road trip with his freshly cremated dad.

The problem with characterisation is with Claire. She’s a complex, compulsively positive person who makes a point of taking Drew over at the lowest point in his life. She’s a tad too saccharine and very annoying – at least, the amount of effort she puts into organizing Drew’s long postulated roadtrip with his father is bordering on compulsive rescuing/control. She’s one of those irritating people who has a solution and an answer for every problem – and she’s right, of course. Nevertheless, in real life – or their future life after this crisis – it’s difficult to see her as someone who could allow him to be other than someone who needs rescuing. Perhaps this is why the talented and charming Kirsten Dunst doesn’t quite pull off the character of Claire.

Other performances are fine. Bloom is suitably shell-shocked and overwhelmed throughout. Alec Baldwin as Drew’s boss Phil is bitterly jovial as he lets Drew know just how monumentally he has failed. Paul Schneider as Drew’s cousin Jessie is superb as a failed musician of the one-time band ‘Ruckus’ – and does an astonishing rendition of Freebird complete with conflagrational effects at the memorial to Mitch – as well as having a satisfying character arc as a parent of a hyperactive child waking up to his responsibilities. Susan Sarandon as Hollie, Drew’s mother, performs a lengthy tap-dancing tribute befitting the Diva she is and finally allays the resentment of the townsfolk of Elizabethtown for taking Mitch away from them so many years before.

It may be that director Cameron Crowe has here attempted too much with the genre mix. The romance would work well on its own, as would the story of Drew’s getting to know his father only after his death. Although the story lines segue in well enough, there is too much overlay of the love story on the other and the character of Claire is too much of a rescuer to be fully likable. Nevertheless, the comedy is sweet and sourly funny and rests firmly in authentic human experience.

Finally, this is a Cameron Crowe film and so music has a huge part, contributing greatly to the feel of this Kentucky community and to the road trip afterwards.

© Avril Carruthers                        2^nd November 2005