Film

Elizabethtown (2005)

Director: Cameron Crowe

Movie review

From Time Out London

Cameron Crowe (‘Vanilla Sky’, ‘Almost Famous’) has pulled a ready-made collage of movie clichés out of the bag and made an uplifting-but-tender, coming-of-age movie about homecoming. Or should that be a tender-but-uplifting, homecoming movie about coming of age? Either way, anyone with a drop of cynicism in their blood will be chewing their fist for the majority of this oh-so-good-hearted tale of grief, love and personal discovery.  A reckless approach to depression and (attempted) suicide mars this sentimental story from the beginning. Orlando Bloom is Drew, a successful, twenty-something, workaholic trainer designer who loses his job in spectacular fashion. This calamity – which prompts his near-suicide – coincides with the death of Drew’s distant father, an event which takes him reluctantly to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he is reunited with his father’s colourful Southern clan. A chance meeting en route with a pretty air hostess, Claire (Kirsten Dunst) marks the beginning of Drew’s re-entry to normal life and his realisation that there’s more to life than work (oh, how sage).Most of the film involves the preparation and execution of a memorial service for Drew’s dad, the run-up to which coincides with the first tentative steps of Drew and Claire’s courtship. But the last fifteen minutes have Drew embarking alone on a healing road trip, accompanied by a detailed map and a CD of music compiled by Dunst’s character. We witness the dreaded Hollywood notion of a character’s ‘journey’ become reality as Bloom awakens the man within by taking to the highway and visiting several, life-affirming monuments to recent American history – including the hotel where Martin Luther King was shot. The entire enterprise smacks of wish-fulfilment provoked by middle-age male guilt. Uplifting, it most certainly ain’t.

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