Hola all. Massawyrm here. Cameron Crowe is one of those infinitely lauded filmmakers that you either love or get howled at by fans for not loving. And to be perfectly honest, Crowe is one of those rare cases that I actually agree with the masses on. He is the Jack Kerouac of contemporary American cinema, tempered with a healthy dose of Norman Rockwell, offering up sentimental snapshots culled from his life and the lives of those around him, treating us to raw, distilled emotion that roots itself in the universal experiences we all share. Crowe doesn’t create something new and different for us to revel in, rather, he wins us over with familiarity, with his ability to tell stories we can relate to on a very human level.
And I’ve had a very odd go of it, growing up with his films. You see, until Elizabethtown, Crowe had yet to direct a single movie that I could relate to, or even care for all that much when first I saw them – because for some odd reason, Crowe’s films were always just a few years ahead of my own life. Say Anything, a film about High School love and the journey beyond the barrier of adolescence, was released while I was finishing up Middle School. I was simply too young to get it. Similarly, Singles, a film about the 90’s post-college Grunge scene was released just as I graduated High School and had yet to be immersed in it. I saw Jerry Maguire a scant ten months into what was to become my thus far 11-year relationship with my wife, having yet to experience the romantic foibles that Jerry Maguire was entirely about. And Almost Famous, a film about a young writer for an underground magazine being taken under the wing of an opinionated critic on the fringe and being given his chance to go on a wild trip with those he’d so long admired, was released a full year and a half before I was invited to Join AICN, and two years before I myself would end up on my first such trip that actually included a young actor telling me “Dude, just make me look cool.” You see, I liked all of these movies when I first saw them, but never understood what all the fuss was about. Until I watched them again. Cameron Crowe was always just a few steps ahead of me, showing me what was to come - and I just didn’t get it. But one by one, each of his films crept back into my life.
It wasn’t until I caught Jerry Maguire on television one night, many years after release, that I finally understood his films. There I sat on the couch as the final scene unfolded, Tom Cruise on bended knee belting out his “You complete me” speech followed by the most clichéd, most laughed about and parodied line of the 1990’s “You had me at hello.” And tears were streaming down my cheeks. I was crying like a pansy assed sissy boy who just had his prized Darth Vader backpack stolen. I got it. I’d been there. I finally understood what the hell Crowe was talking about, how important it was that Jerry Maguire had just come back. And suddenly a movie that my wife (then girlfriend) and I had initially walked out shrugging from became a wonderful, beautiful film for which I found it hard to express my love of. I mean, the logical side of me argued profusely “Dude, seriously? You had me at hello? That’s fucking cheese!” But my emotional side, my very soul, wiped away the tears and said “Dude, shut the fuck up. It’s beautiful.”
And I had similar experiences with every single (true) Cameron Crowe film. Vanilla Sky doesn’t count. Crowe has this whole beauty in truth, blurring the line between his real life and his characters’ lives, Jack Kerouac thing going on and he should just stay away from Science Fiction entirely. Science Fiction was for Burroughs, not Kerouac – and it should stay that way. Vanilla Sky was an interesting experiment, not unlike a college boy saying “Hmmm, I wonder what a dude blowing me would be like” then finding out that beard stubble just plain sucks, moving him firmly back into punannyville.
What Crowe truly excels at is schmaltz – good old fashioned, corn fed, American Schmaltz. Schmaltz so sentimental, so endearing, so perfect that it actually becomes iconic. His images, his words, actually become ingrained in American culture to the point that they become cliché upon consumption, despite being wholly original. While you won’t find Say Anything on any Top 100 lists, the image of John Cusack standing with that Boom Box held high in the air is just as unforgettable, just as emotionally moving as Bogart’s Casablanca “Hill of Beans” speech to Bergman. And it’s been parodied almost as often. His films are warm, cozy, touching blankets to wrap yourself in after a bad day and remind you that there is beauty even in the most average of lives. And that’s what I love most about Cameron Crowe – his films aren’t about superheroes, nor are they about cracked families in the middle of fucked up suburbia. They’re about normal people in normal situations to which most of us can relate. Cameron Crowe isn’t about extremes. He’s about the rest of us.
Which brings us to Elizabethtown. If there’s one thing I can be thankful for in Vanilla Sky even existing, it’s that the year it took to make allowed me to catch up emotionally with the stories Crowe wants to tell. I simply loved this movie. And yet, frankly, it’s the most flawed of his semi-autobiographical works. Easily Crowe’s most self-indulgent film, Elizabethtown is a story of mixed emotions revolving around a man who’s spent so much of his life focused upon achievement that when faced with failure he discovers just how much he missed along the way. But having virtually the same plot as Zach Braff’s Garden State, Crowe proves just how great a filmmaker he is by getting everything right that Braff got wrong. Garden State spent so much time trying to be weird, trying to convey the over-medicated Los Angeles feeling of numbness, and trying to look as cool as it could muster at every possible moment, that Braff completely ignored the humanity of issues at hand. Cameron Crowe does not.
Elizabethtown is a simple story, one driven by Crowe’s usual sense of humor and style. As with each of his previous works it both proves to be a satire of modern society and a loving portrayal of it at the same time. In a year when we seem inundated with films that wish to ceaselessly mock small town southern life (like the recent efforts Junebug and Daltry Calhoun), Elizabethtown manages to make several of the same jokes while simultaneously celebrating the sense of community and love that permeates small town southern culture. And it works. The film is sweetly hilarious.
But as I said, the film is flawed. The story isn’t anything we haven’t seen before and neither are the characters. And if Cameron Crowe’s name weren’t on this film, whoever’s name was on it would be accused of blatantly ripping him off. You can smell Cameron Crowe on every frame of this film from twenty paces outside the theatre. There’s no mistaking it. This is the most readily identifiable of his films. And those who are not enamored of his style or tricks are simply going to be driven batshit crazy by it, particularly the ending.
You see, Cameron Crowe’s most distinctive quality as a filmmaker is one he shares with Quentin Tarantino. His films are intrinsically tied to the music of his life, the music of the era he’s set the film in; and the music he chooses forever becomes tied to whatever he does with it. Whether you like it or not. That music, much like his memorable images, immediately conjures up the moments of the film in which he uses them. For some of us, that is the masterstroke of a Cameron Crowe film. For others, those for whom the emotional nature of the films just doesn’t seem to connect, it feels more like he’s just sifting through his record collection. And in the last fifteen or so minutes of this film Crowe just goes nuts. It seems as if he simply plugged his iPod into his Avid and hit shuffle.
Now for me, I loved that touch. But of course if I were ever offered a chance to spend two hours with Cameron Crowe I’d simply throw out my arms and say “Dude, break out the vinyl and tell me a story”, because that’s what Cameron Crowe films are all about. That’s the Cameron Crowe experience. But not everyone wants that, not everyone can relate to the stories he tells. And that’s the biggest problem with Cameron Crowe’s films, especially Elizabethtown. You cannot simply love his films for the way he tells his stories. You cannot love them for any sort of unique visual style, for any sort of subtlety. The heart and soul of Crowe’s work relies entirely on being able to relate to the story he’s telling. It relies entirely upon being able to say “Man, I know exactly what you’re saying. I’ve totally been there.” And if you can’t relate, if you haven’t been there, well, it’s just another story that’s occasionally funny, somewhat hokey and chock full of music you may or may not like. For those that can’t relate I imagine it’s something akin to hanging out at your buddies house while he plays 30 seconds of each of his favorite songs while telling you what each song means to him. And anyone that hasn’t been into any of Crowe’s films before certainly isn’t going to change their opinion of him with Elizabethtown. Self-indulgent is a phrase you’re going to hear a lot as you read more and more reviews of it, because that’s what it is.
And yet, that’s exactly why I love it. Cameron Crowe makes films that seem as if he is borrowing from my life, not his. He seems to be reaching in and plucking out the most visceral, heart wrenching moments I’ve lived through and translating them to the screen for all to see. Elizabethtown took me back to just a year ago when I visited my own extended family in small town upstate New York, a family I barely know and seems to love me for my direct relation and striking resemblance to my father – and it took me back to the two hour car ride to the airport with my dad where for the first time in our lives we were absolutely real with one another. And we got to know one another after almost thirty years of simply thinking we knew one another. But that’s the beauty of the shared human experience. That’s the beauty of Cameron Crowe’s films. While these experiences aren’t unique, they are special, and Crowe’s films remind us of that.
The last fifteen minutes of this film are the most important – they’re the real journey of Orlando Bloom’s Drew Baylor. It’s all about the reconnection to humanity, the reconnection to his father. It’s about crossing that barrier of understanding that your loved one is truly gone and never coming back. It’s about letting yourself cry and moving on. It’s about celebrating life. And it’s told in the way Cameron Crowe always tells it – through the music that is so very much important to him. And it’s this fifteen minutes that will cause the most debate after the film.
You see, Elizabethtown has two endings. The first is the ending that those who don’t grok Crowe will see - which doesn’t actually resolve anything at all but rather proves to be the catalyst for the final segment of the film – and the second is that emotional journey itself. This is why I’ve spent so much time talking about the ending and not everything leading up to it. The ending is the soul of the film, the crux of whether you love it or not, and it’s the part that most reminded me that you’ve either been there or you haven’t. And I can’t fault anyone with not digging it. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of films that I will argue until I’m blue in the face about. This isn’t one of them. It’s not a matter of whether you “get” the film – after all, it’s fairly transparent. It’s a matter of whether you’ve “felt” the film. We all share the same experiences, but they come to us in different forms at different times, and if you can’t relate well then it’s just the way the chips have fallen. Maybe somewhere down the road it’ll hit you, like Jerry Maguire hit me. Like Say Anything hit me. Like Almost Famous hit me.
While the performances, the direction and the pacing of Elizabethtown are all solid, there’s nothing truly stand out about them. Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst and Susan Sarandon are all very good, but none deliver career highs. The weight of this film rests entirely on what you bring in with you, not what Crowe gives you to take away.
When Jack Kerouac sat down to put to paper his rules for writing, to explain his method to his closest friends, he explained that all writing should be a free form expression like a jazz musician fluidly blowing out notes. He wrote about “Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog” and that “Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form.” Most importantly, he wrote “Be in love with yr(sic) life.” No one, and I mean no one, in American cinema exemplifies this philosophy like Cameron Crowe. And like Kerouac, some will call him genius for this work while others will simply accuse him of pretentiously jerking off with his record collection. Me, I love Crowe’s work. It speaks to me. Elizabethtown reminded me how special my time with my father really was, and remdined me even moreso to appreciate the time we have left. It made me want to call him immediately after watching it and get to know him even better. If you can relate to that you’ll no doubt find Elizabethtown a magnificent film – if not, well, then perhaps someday you will, and you and I can exchange knowing looks letting each other know that I get you, you get me and Cameron Crowe, well, he gets us both. Until then, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Until next time, friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em. I know I will.
Massawyrm
If you're the man to complete me, you'll have me at 'hello'!
