Elizabethtown

My love for Cameron Crowe and his Almost Famous is huge. I loved the theatrical cut that many people didn't, and then the Untitled cut is one of my top 2 favorite movies of all time. Now Cameron brings us Elizabethtown, and I can't believe how much I disliked this film. It has a few ideas I loved, but the execution is awful, the overall story seems like something I've seen before and loved (more on that later), and not even the soundtrack (a Cameron classic for greatness) did anything for me.

I'll start with the story, because this is was too much like Garden State. Parent dies, and a young man with a failed career goes to his father's childhood town to get the body, and there finds lots of weird people, and meets a young woman and falls in love with her.
Now when the movie started I had mixed feelings already. It starts with a voice over by Orlando Bloom who plays our hero Drew Baylor. The voice over is horrible, and it's used during the entire movie. A disaster really. Then he goes to the place he works, we meet his girlfriend who will later dump him, played by Jessica Biel, in a 2 scenes role, and she's an unlikeable character from the start, but then we meet Alec Baldwin and the movie is saved.
Baldwin plays Phil DeVoss, Drew's boss, he informs him that the shoe that Drew design will make the company lose a billion dollars, and that his career is over. Alec is way too little in the movie so he just saved it for that one scene he's in.

Drew goes back to his apartment, and feeling like a failure he tries to kill himself and right there he receives a call from his sister telling him that their father died and that he needs to take care of everything because their mother is going crazy. The sister is Heather, played by the wonderful Judy Greer, wasted again with just a handful of scenes and nothing to do. The mother is Hollie, played by Susan Sarandon, in a role that should've given her at least an Oscar nom but there's no way it will. It's a good performance wrongly handled, with a crazy funny scenes at the beginning and then a stand up show at the funeral that doesn't work at all. And the reason, which is the same for most of the characters, is the backstory, there's none.

And so Drew goes to Elizabethtown, KY, the place his father grew up. This is a great scene, the welcoming by the entire town. He doesn't know anybody, but everybody knows him. I know that feeling, it happens to me every time I go to my grandma's house where my mom grew up. Everybody knows me and I have no idea who they are, but they are always friendly happy to see me. Then he starts meeting the family he never knew and other people, and while some characters show promise, like Paul Schneider who plays his cousin Jessie or Bruce McGill's Bill Banyon, a friend of the family who did something to Drew's parents in the past but it's never clear what, they are not developed, and so I didn't connect with anybody there.

And finally there's Kirsten Dunst's Claire, my other huge problem with the movie. She's the muse, the new friend he falls in love with, she's Natalie Portman's Sam and she's Kate Hudson's Penny Lane at the same time, or tries to be, but fails. I love Kirsten, she's one of my favorite actresses but this was way too much of her. I got tired of her and her forced smile and the forced comedy bits from her never work. Natalie Portman was radiant and beautiful, the girl of dreams, but she has problems too and you felt for her. Kirsten's Claire is nothing like that. She has no backstory at all, and no problems at all either, other than faking having a boyfriend (another touch taken from Sam) which I saw coming from a mile away. I was also not happy with the "Hello Stranger" like that they show on the trailers, which is also a Natalie Portman line though not from Garden State but from Closer.
The other good idea of the movie comes from Drew's relationship with Claire, as the hotel he's staying in is currently taken by a couple who just got married. "Chuck & Cindy - The Wedding" is great, and even though is just a little bit, and it doesn't touch the overall story, is the only part of the movie I really liked.

Imagine of Garden State sucked bad, if you got tired of Sam, or if the rest of the supporting characters had no story or problems, that's Elizabethtown, a movie that manipulates your feelings with many slow motion scenes with characters having fun and falling in love, and we are supposed to care for them but we don't, because we don't have anything in common with them and because they have no problems, except Drew but he's different. I didn't like him because of Orlando Bloom, who I thought I would like without a sword and dressed in an armor but I didn't like. He's way too serious and I didn't buy him being a real person in today's world. I know it's impossible now, but I wish Cameron could back and make the movie with Ashton Kutcher as he originally planned. One of my biggest, if not the biggest disappointment for me this year, I was supposed to love this with all my heart but it didn't happen. And I hope I like Elizabethtown better with repeated viewings, I really do, but I'm not sure I will, because Orlando and his voice over will still be there.