Elizabethtown

2005. 123 minutes. Rated R.
Can you imagine an entire life wrapped up in a shoe?

Elizabethtown

First of all, this is NOT a bad movie.

Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) is a master of last looks. The groundbreaking shoe of his original design, the Spasmodica, ends up being groundbreaking only in its unprecedented failure. He loses his job, his status as shoe design wunderkid, and a ridiculously large amount of his company’s money. His career is so ruined that there’s no question of starting over, supporting his lifestyle, or even, potentially, continuing to live. Wallowing in self-pity, Drew constructs an elaborate suicide plan, but balks when he receives news of his father’s death. As he returns home for his father’s funeral, he opens himself to human kindness and the possibility of love with airline stewardess Claire Coburn (Kirsten Dunst).

Elizabethtown has an undeservedly poor reputation. To be honest, I’m about to defend it as a decent, likeable chick flick that deserves a chance. It gets a lot of hell from mainstream critics, and you can see a few examples at Rottentomatoes.com, where you will hear about this film’s shallowness, sketchiness, silliness, or whatever. You’ll probably hear some mean things about Orlando Bloom and writer-director Cameron Crowe.. However, if you dig a little deeper–try the comments on YouTube–you’ll find that not only does this film have fans, but it’s kind of a quiet fan favorite.

There’s a reason that Elizabethtown is well-rated by viewers and not by critics. While it’s a charming film that features some touching hallmarks of love in transitional phases, it’s not exactly riddled with metaphor. Critics tend to adore head-scratchers like Vanilla Sky because they like to test the old analytic faculties. That’s great for intellectuals, but frankly, it’s no way to decide how arbitrarily “good” a movie is. Crowd-pleasers, on the other hand, tend to get panned by mainstream critics. For the most part, that isn’t because they “just suck;” it’s because they aren’t really food for thought. There’s a lot of ways to say this. (Heavy-handed. Shallow. Trite. Whatever.)

What it boils down to is that someone who does this professionally thought it was boring. There are plenty of astronauts and brain surgeons who get bored by stuff that they consider pretty standard, but which most of the rest of us would classify as heart-racing high-tension adventure. Critics may not be quite that glamorous, but they also tend to get jaded. We forget that our audience is not made up of Ph. D candidates who watch three movies a week and attend two annual film festivals. We’re supposed to be writing for people who want to see a fun movie.

That’s why you should watch Elizabethtown anyway.

This is a film you really can just pop into your streaming video cue on a weekend. As far as art goes, it probably falls close to the middle of the bell curve between The Third Man and Plan 9 From Outer Space. That said, it gets major bonus points for being available to call upon in the name of romance. It’s also visually attractive and very easy to watch, featuring a lot of travel shots and rolling, quintessentially rural-America scenery. This is close to a perfect date movie. It’s got some gags, some puppy love, a cute road trip scrapbook, and good feels.

Bloom and Dunst are attractive young people who do a decent job in their roles. The supporting cast includes a number of big-name talents who clearly did this just for fun, especially Susan SarandonAlec Baldwin, and Paula Deen. They provide a colorful backdrop of personalities that highlight the fact that Bloom and Dunst are really still kids.

Maybe some critics didn’t like the main characters because they looked so immature in context, but I really think they were supposed to seem young. After all, they’re working millennials in that weird transitional period that you hit in your very early twenties, that odd moment when you still have to fight down shock when you find yourself holding an honest-to-God paycheck, but it says “void” because you have direct deposit and you just can’t figure out what that means, and you’re also too nervous to ask anyone because you’re afraid of looking like the young hire who turned out to be a short-lived and quickly-forgotten bad idea, and also an idiot who will never work again.

Drew Baylor’s mega mess-up is eerily typical of nightmares that I had every week at my first job. I found him totally sympathetic. Claire Coburn’s cheerful attitude toward a starter job that callously monopolizes her personal time also hit home. I particularly liked how she inventively worked around her schedule to meet her personal priorities.

Maybe I liked it more because I saw myself in the main characters, but Elizabethtown is just really nice. It’s a romantic comedy, a road trip film, a coming-of-age movie, and on top of all that it’s got a little edge. It’s no festival pick, but it’s worth an hour and half of your life.

Author: Anna

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