Elizabethtown arrives this weekend after several months of intriguing trailers suggesting an off-beat comedy offset by rumors of a colossal flop. Early buzz from the film festivals was that audiences were turned off by Crowe’s 135-minute opus, producing a round of cutting which trimmed the theatrical release to just over two hours.

Not good enough for the national critics. While Roger Ebert liked the changes well enough (he calls it “sweet and good-hearted”), other national reviewers panned the movie.  Typical assessments were Entertainment Weekly’s “undershaped [and] overlong” and the Washington Post’s claim that it provoked “a sharp tummy cramp of disbelief.”        

            Well.  It is longer than it needs to be, with too many ideas vying for our attention, but it is also sweet and funny.  How could it not be, with its exceedingly cute co-stars, Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, and its warm-fuzzy themes of family and serendipitous love?  Still, coherence and pacing might have been helped by cutting another 15 minutes or so.

            The opening sequence, which depicts Drew Baylor’s (Bloom) firing after his shoe design costs his employer almost a billion dollars and his subsequent fixation on suicide, drags out its exposition much too long, its chief redeeming feature Alec Baldwin’s scene munching as Drew’s pretending-to-be-sensitive-but-really-a-shark boss.

            The film also goes on too long, failing to conclude at the logical point.  Its two key themes are family reconciliation in the wake of Drew’s father’s sudden death and the redeeming power of love with a ditzy flight attendant, Claire (Dunst).  The former is resolved at a hilariously out-of-control memorial service, and the latter could be too – but Crowe extends the film through a cross-country automobile trip.

            Elizabethtown will frustrate those looking for a coherent plot.  There are, however, other perspectives that might help to appreciate this movie - for instance, the old saying “It’s the journey that counts, not the destination.”

The movie provides numerous small pleasures along the journey – not least of which is one of the best soundtracks in a long time.  Every musical selection is intelligent and thought-provoking, a handful of old favorites mixing in with a lot of relative obscurities drawn from Crowe’s extensive knowledge of pop music.

            The film meditates on the value of words, including Claire’s theory of “good” and “bad” names and Drew’s straining for just the right word to describe the expression on his father’s face as he lies in the coffin.  Still, as often as the language makes us laugh or think, it strains our patience as it strains to be clever.  A late-night conversation seems designed solely to get to the lame pun, “son of a Mitch.” (Drew’s father’s name is Mitch, get it?  Nudge, nudge.)  Claire tells Drew, “I’m impossible to forget but I’m difficult to remember” – a pseudo-profundity that looks brilliant but means nothing.

            Some bits are genuinely funny, most notably the memorial service, as friends and relations of the deceased provide humorous instances of Drew’s observation that each person has his own version of Mitch.  Susan Sarandon’s turn as Drew’s mother is truly hilarious; she shares stories of her life with and then without her husband, finally segueing into a stand-up comedy routine and a spotlit tap-dance to “Moon River.” Later, a southern-rock band plays on as the hall catches fire around them and Claire slips into flight-attendant mode, directing people to safety.

            In the 19^th century, a school of poetry called the “Spasmodics” featured relatively pedestrian language building to occasional “spasms” of true poetic insight.  The pleasure to be derived from this film is like that to be gained from “Spasmodic” poetry, i.e., a joy in small touches here and there rather than in the overall work.

How ironic, then, is the name of the failed shoe Drew designed.  It is called the “Spasmodica.”

 This review appeared in the Aberdeen American News on October 17, 2005.

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