Elizabethtown (or, "Credit where credit has never been farther from due")

After a disastrous screening at the Toronto Film Festival, Cameron Crowe dove back into the editing room to trim 18 minutes of fat from Elizabethtown. As it turns out, though we haven't been subjected to the original cut, it would appear that these edits succeeded only in confirming what many of us suspected after Vanilla Sky: Crowe is just not very talented.

"But," we hear you crying out, "Cameron Crowe is an American treasure! What about Almost Famous? Jerry Maguire? Say Anything?!" In order, we respond: "no," "shit," "shitter," and "that was 18 years ago."

To be sure, the much-lauded Say Anything boasts fresh dialogue and well-placed humor, but in the final analysis, it may not actually be better than other 80s romantic comedies, even if one limits the field to those 80s romantic comedies starring John Cusack. Crowe's follow-up, Singles, appealed to a niche crowd which has become steadily niche-ier since the film's 1992 release, seeing as the contemporary viewer is forced to cope with the song stylings of Mudhoney. Nevertheless, these films remain at least likable enough. If Crowe had been interested in nailing down some artistic credibility, he should seriously have considered a martyred death in a fiery car wreck before embarking on the film that happened to him next.

History will never be able to take back Jerry Maguire's five Oscar nominations, no matter how desperately we foster our denial that Cuba Gooding, Jr., star of Radio and Boat Trip, owns an Academy Award with his name on it. Even for the viewer who enjoyed Jerry Maguire upon its initial release, present-day reevaluations consistently end in shocked realizations that this movie really, really blows. Like Gladiator and Braveheart, the test of time has not been kind to this pandering dud, which briefly convinced the world that two annoying catch phrases and three annoying performances equals one great movie.

With the 2000 release of Almost Famous, critics and audiences embraced Crowe once again, bestowing him with an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, nominating the film for three more. To be fair, it reminded people that "Tiny Dancer" was a pretty good song and cemented Kate Hudson as "America's Sweetheart" for exactly 11 seconds, but Almost Famous -- a beloved film that many smart, tax-paying individuals list as one of their all-time top 10 movies -- is bad. It is a shamefully idealized account of a young Cameron Crowe hanging out with rock bands and losing his virginity, and its inability to decide whether it is a piece of music journalism or a magical road fantasy renders it useless as either.

If nothing else, Vanilla Sky was so terrible that at least film critics were given license not to like one of Crowe's films. Had Elizabethtown been Crowe's first film after Almost Famous, there is a distinct possibility that reviewers might have zombied their way through another wave of positive reviews; in its own way, perhaps Vanilla Sky had some positive effect on society after all.

Elizabethtown is the latest in a string of movies that leads us to question whether Crowe has ever met an actual human before; though Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) and Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst) seem to resemble our species on the outside, their behavior establishes them in an off-putting parallel universe in which the official language is "Things No One Has Ever Said." Consider one of Claire's first speeches to Drew, in which she provides pithy insights into characters she never meets based on their first name alone. Meanwhile, Drew bumbles around doing nothing of value and receiving a surreal amount of credit for some kind of general goodness we never, ever see (Crowe's identification with his lead male characters has always been embarrassingly obvious, but here the line between art and life blurs more than usual).

Because so many of the characters' motivations are impossible to identify with (such as Hollie Baylor's zany response to her husband's demise), their bogus emotional payoffs ring utterly false. The intrusive soundtrack, in true Crowe tradition, barges in to extract the correct emotional responses from the audience, leading them to believe the director has actually done his job. Let's just say any film whose last 15 minutes consist of the main character driving around listening to a mix tape does not have faith in its own narrative strengths.

At Elizabethtown's slapdash core, Claire Colburn epitomizes the most frustrating aspects of not only this film, but Crowe's entire oeuvre; in a way, Crowe's entire career has been leading up to Claire (who even shares Crowe's initials). She is the logical dead-end in an oeuvre built on quirk as a cheap substitute for character, her words and actions so indecipherably "adorable" that we wonder how she possibly functions when the camera isn't around. When you see the Road Trip In A Box she throws together for Drew, the only reasonable reaction from the viewer is a disquieted, "Who DOES that?"

Crowe didn't just employ every romantic comedy cliché in the book; he found the actual book and shot it page for page. Elizabethtown is a movie constructed entirely of rom-com hoops for Drew and Claire to limp through, as they Meet Cute (check), don't get along at first (check), have sex for no reason (check), fight for no reason (check), and share a climactic slow-motion kiss even though they're a horrible match and know nothing about each other (check). With remarkable economy, all of this is accomplished through a magical blend of Claire's random invasion of Drew's personal life and Drew's plush-like passivity.

Elizabethtown is bad enough to make us hate actors we usually love, including Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin (even Orlando Bloom isn't bad in those Lord of the Rings movies). Remarkably, Elizabethtown had already commenced filming with Ashton Kutcher in the role of Drew Baylor when Crowe decided he wasn't right for the part and hired Orlando Bloom to replace him; if we can't rely on Ashton Kutcher as a dependable worst-case scenario for any cinematic production, what can we really count on in this world?

Ultimately, though the world generally turned it a blind eye (the most generous offer this movie could hope for), Elizabethtown needed to exist. As a wake-up call, this film could not be more effective in finally, totally ripping the mask off one of Hollywood's hackiest fauxteurs. We can only regard Elizabethtown as the final sequence in the M. Night Shyamalan movie about Crowe's career, in which the audience gazes upon what they have just witnessed and, consequently, rethinks everything they've seen until now: "Should I believe any of what has happened so far? Was it all smoke and mirrors leading to a shocking conclusion? Was any of this real?"

START SLOW ROLLING BELOW!

00:41:25 - 00:47:58
Drew plays phone tag with the ladies in his life.
Originally published: 25 May 07

01:37:36 - 01:41:44
Mitch Baylor's memorial, part 2.
Originally published: 13 June 07