Elizabethtown
(Widescreen)
Picture: B
Sound: B Extras: D Film: C+
"As somebody once said, 'There's a difference between
a failure and a fiasco,'" says Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) as the first
moments of Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown (2005) unfurls. "A failure is simply the non-presence
of success. Any fool can accomplish
failure. But a fiasco! A fiasco is a disaster of mythic
proportions. A fiasco is a folktale
told to others that makes other people feel more alive because it didn't happen to them."
It's tempting to say that this is a prescient -- and
ironic -- opening -- to Crowe's latest film: prescient because Elizabethtown
is, hands down, Crowe's most disappointing film since Jerry Maguire, and
ironic because Crowe himself wrote the lines of dialogue that seem to fit the
film so well. But to argue that the
film is either a fiasco or a failure or both would be wrong. Instead, it exists somewhere in between.
On one hand, it's so hard to dislike Elizabethtown,
Crowe's film about father-son relationships, life and death, and, of course,
love found in the most unlikely places -- and in the most unlikely people. It's so earnest and well-meaning, with
characters that you can't help but like, that you find yourself smiling in warm
appreciation that you've been invited into their lives, even if for only a
couple hours.
On the other, the first half hour or so is so gruelingly
unbearable that you have to wonder just what Crowe was thinking. And then, if you can make it past the
stilted dialogue, the awful appearance of Jessica Biel as Drew's token
heartbreaker, and an uncharacteristically bad performance by Alec Baldwin,
showing up briefly as Drew's boss (who's painted as both ruthless billionaire
corporate baron and hands-on, in-touch-with-feelings softie simultaneously --
and neither are convincing), then you find a film that shares a lot in common
with Garden State and a sticky, syrupy tale that's about as filling as a
Twinkie.
But what ultimately makes Elizabethtown so
frustrating is that it plays more like a series of vignettes rather than a
complete film.
For instance, there are three plots happening almost
simultaneously throughout the film: Drew gets fired from his job as a shoe
designer for a major shoe manufacturer after his latest design fails to attract
consumer interest, causes a backlash among the public, and costs his company
nearly a billion dollars; the death of Drew's father, the implementation of his
last rites, and the memorial for him, all of which is what brings Drew to Elizabethtown,
Kentucky in the first place; and the burgeoning relationship between Drew and
Claire (Kirsten Dunst), whom he meets on the plane -- she's a flight attendant
-- on the way to Louisville en route to Elizabethtown. Crowe is usually adept at juggling many
different plotlines at once -- see Say Anything… as a prime example --
but here, he seems to get so wrapped up in telling one story that the other
plots get dropped, only to be picked back up again, abruptly, when Crowe
realizes he's veered off track.
And there are so many good things in two of the plotlines
-- the one about Drew getting fired for losing all that money for his company
is so bizarre and far-fetched that it's laughable, and Baldwin's scene-chewing
five minutes on-screen doesn't help -- that you just want to be wrapped up in
one of them. Instead, we get this
awkward bouncing back and forth between them, as if we're the ball in a pinball
game and Crowe is at the controls, flipping us between the different plot
bumpers.
Elizabethtown works as snapshots -- or
Polaroids, the photo format Crowe's characters are so fond of using -- as
America and American life. When you put
those snaps in the larger photo album that is a film, they simply don't amount
to much. And that's unfortunate. There are enough legitimately good moments
in the film that you want to like it.
But things just don't add up at the end.
Cameron Crowe is one of America's best screenwriters, but
when it comes to Crowe realizing his scripts, something's lost in the translation. In some cases, like with Vanilla Sky,
he gets anchored by a twist or turn; in others he's caught up in paying tribute
to Billy Wilder, like he does in Elizabethtown as he tries his damnedest
to make the Drew-Claire relationship as close to that of Wendell Armbruster Jr.
and Juliet Mills in Billy Wilder’s Avanti! from 1972.
What you get from that, ultimately, is a spotty
filmography of superb hits and gross misses.
Elizabethtown doesn't belong in either end of that spectrum, but
it does occupy a space closer to the "misses" end than the
"hits" one, despite all the good things in the film.
Adding to the film's misfortune is its DVD presentation.
Visually, Elizabethtown looks good. Its anamorphic widescreen presentation is
clean and vibrant, richly bringing out the lush deep greens of Kentucky as well
as the bland slate grays of hotels and corporate hallways. Similarly, on the audio side, the 5.1 Dolby
Digital mix brings Crowe's dialogue-heavy film to life. There are only a couple scenes of pyrotechnics,
and these sound decent in the mix.
Where the disc fails is in the extras. A cursory scan of the back of the DVD case
shows five extras, a fair amount in today's increasing bare-bones initial
releases of films. But when you dig
into them, you realize that these five extras amount to very little.
In addition to a photo gallery and two trailers for the
film, there are two extended scenes which are nothing more than an isolation of
a video watched in the film and a behind-the-scenes outtake of a scene that
gets about ten seconds worth of screen time during the film and goes about
seven minutes as an "extended scene." Then, there's "Training Wheels," a five-minute
featurette that's nothing more than a montage of screen-test footage of members
of the cast and "Meet the Crew," another five-minute-ish
featurette highlighting some of the people behind the scenes that helped make
the film a reality.
Sure, it's a nice gesture on Crowe's part to give his crew
their 15 minutes and seeing some goofy footage of some of the cast can be fun,
none of the extras offer anything remotely insightful as far as Elizabethtown
goes. Why Paramount even exerted the
effort with these extras is a mystery; the disc would have been as worthwhile
with no extras as it is with what it has.
Ultimately, Elizabethtown arrives on a DVD that's
quite analogous of the film itself -- good in parts (the film), mostly bad in
others (the extras), and generally unsatisfying. It's entirely within the realm of possibility that there will be
another Elizabethtown disc down the road. But, given the film's lack of box office success, that seems like
a remote prospect at best, leaving a lackluster DVD for a film that deserved a
little better in its wake.
- Dante A.
Ciampaglia
