Dir. Cameron Crowe, 2005, US, 123 mins
Cast: Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon
Cameron Crowe's latest takes the form of a sentimental road journey through America's Mid-West, a paean to its good ol' towns and tourist spots set to the now customary accompaniment of rock classics and bluesy jazz. Thing is, this only takes up the last 20 minutes of the film and before that there's a long prologue to get through, involving Orlando Bloom's businessman returning to the town where his father has died.
We're in familiar territory here. Elizabethtown is yet another variation on that hoary old American cliche of a man down on his luck meeting a kooky but spirited girl who shows him the way back to happiness and self-fulfilment. Crowe has cross-fertilised it with another writer's favourite, the odyssey of a hero bringing a loved one to their resting place - as seen in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Last Orders, and Tommy Lee Jones' upcoming western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. And just as Bloom travelled to a distant land to learn from another culture in his last film, Kingdom Of Heaven, so here he finds in Kentucky a vibrancy lacking in his high-powered lifestyle out west. It's that fish-out-of-water plot again with sophisticated city boy first bemused, then amused, by the homely if somewhat patronisingly portrayed Southern milieu.
But the real target of Elizabethtown's gentle - certainly not laugh-out-loud - humour is the rapacious business culture Bloom has inhabited for so long. Crowe has a lot of fun at the expense of Alec Baldwin's corporate boss who appears to have invested his profits in an international wildlife rescue operation - as you would. And what did he make his money from? Shoes. It's a gorgeous touch that the society that comes under the film's microscope is initially identified as one so obsessed with consumerism that something as trivial as a trainer can make millions - make that billions - of dollars. Mind you, having called into question how much we're prepared to spend on our lifestyle, it might seem bizarre that Crowe has Bloom and Kirsten Dunst get it together over the longest mobile call in cinema history. Anyone who's faced a large phone bill recently will be sweating - it takes the motto "It's good to talk" to ridiculous extremes.
Satire is not the name of the game here, though, and even Baldwin's tycoon is treated affectionately. Instead, Crowe's script is a model of homespun philosophy. US screenwriters have an uncanny knack of capturing modern attitudes in little aphorisms and soundbite phrases, such as Dunst's "ice-cream cone" - ie. a sweet comment made by a boyfriend that is nice while it lasts but is over in five minutes. It's as if the platitudes and banalities of the Trisha show are taken and spun into gold. And doesn't Bloom's final voiceover just feel like one of those little homilies with which Jerry Springer regularly finished his programme?
Bloom's performance is amiable but soft-centred - like the movie - while Dunst excels as the love interest, staying just this side of annoying. But the youngsters are put in the shade by Susan Sarandon, whose one major scene is the high point of Elizabethtown's combination of life lessons, romance and offbeat humour. That the remainder of the film feels rather tacked on is a testament to how much she lifts it in that moment. Crowe's latest may be workmanlike, but Sarandon is sheer class.
Mike Bartlett
|
