Elizabethtown (2005): C

Like being trapped in a car with a music-obsessed hipster intent on proving his coolness by playing every classic rock album in his Case Logic CD Wallet, Elizabethtown proves to be an excruciatingly narcissistic nostalgia trip saturated with writer/director Cameron Crowe’s favorite tunes. Crowe’s semi-autobiographical melodrama involves a sneaker designer named Drew (Orlando Bloom) who – after causing the greatest fiasco in shoe biz history – journeys to Kentucky to retrieve the body of his recently deceased father, along the way discovering the true meaning of family (from his rural relatives), the necessity for accepting failure as a natural component of life, and love with a stewardess named Claire (Kirsten Dunst). In place of three-dimensional character development, Crowe merely gives his smitten lovebirds identifiable traits (Drew likes to mentally collect “last looks;” Claire likes to make “I’m taking a photo with an invisible camera” hand gestures), while slathering every mawkish scene with soundtrack cuts (from Tom Petty, Elton John and Lindsey Buckingham) that heavy-handedly comment on the emotional scenes they accompany. After an oh-so-cute courtship between Drew and Claire in which the two share an all-night phone conversation about nothing (cell phone minutes be damned!) and then giggle their way through buying an urn for Drew’s cremated dad’s remains, things eventually culminate in an embarrassingly “fun” memorial service highlighted (naturally, given Crowe’s music mania) by a fiery cover performance of “Freebird.” But Elizabethtown’s dedication to trite, facile sentimentality is most painfully apparent in Drew’s cross-country drive back home, a mix tape-scored road-trip (mapped out with obsessive meticulousness by Claire) in which Drew’s resolution to forgo suicide and forge ahead with life despite professional disappointment is equated – I kid you not – with Martin Luther King’s civil rights struggle.

Comments

[Wawa]

Dude, isn't EVERY Cameron Crowe movie like that anyways with the Hipster music?

(BTW-Singles . . . greatest movie ever. A compliment for us, is a compliment for you. Or something like that).

[Nick]

Yeah, every Cameron Crowe movie is saturated with incessant music. But that's not a good thing. And, with Elizabethtown, it's finally an unbearable thing.

As for Singles, well, let's just say I don't think it's aged very well.