You have your first-date movies, and then you have your fifth-date movies.
Elizabethtown, clearly, is a fifth-date movie.
It's the kind you see when you're talking all night on the phone and engaging in public displays of affection that gross out the people sitting around you.
Those not living in a bubble of aw-shucks optimism, though, aren't going to have much patience for this sometimes engaging but often meandering mishmash of a movie.
Orlando Bloom stars as Drew, a failed shoe designer who is about to end his life when he learns his dad has died, and he's got to travel to his family homestead in the movie's titular Kentucky town to take care of matters and, of course, find peace and love and a sense of purpose and stuff.
En route he meets Claire (Kirsten Dunst), a pretty, perky and worldly-wise flight attendant.
Dunst is good in the role, at least compared to the out-of-his-depth Bloom, but she and virtually everything else in Elizabethtown are spun out of some sort of neo-Norman Rockwell fantasy fluff. And while there are flashes of smarts and heart here and there, an hour in, things start to grate.
Under a less deft writer and director than Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous), Elizabethtown could have been a truly unwatchable mire of sentimentality.
This is the guy, after all, who made an iconic Gen-X romantic image out of a hangdog John Cusack holding a boombox over his head in Say Anything.
Still: "I will miss your lips, and everything attached to them," coos Dunst in her faux Kentucky twang. A character who talks like that should have a petticoat and a parasol.
And while seeing Drew reconnect with his estranged family through the shared memory of his dad is touching (and inspired by the death of Crowe's own father), that story thread is never properly woven into his budding romance with Claire.
This new and supposedly improved edit of the film, 20 minutes lighter than the version that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, is still too long and loose, and desperately needs to shed its aggravating and metaphor-laden road trip ending.
Or to use the words of Bloom's suicidal shoe man: "A failure is simply the non-presence of success."
By that unforgiving definition, Elizabethtown is a failure.
BOTTOM LINE
Great music and a solid supporting cast can't rescue a movie that loses its way on the sleepy rural backroads of love and loss and belonging. It's just too darn precious for its own good.
This film is rated PG
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