Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
There’s no small irony in the idea that ELIZABETHTOWN is a film about snatching personal victory from the jaws of failure, since I suspect the film’s going to play much better with general audiences than it did with the critical establishment.
By now, anyone who spends any time reading about movies knows about what happened in Toronto. Cameron Crowe took the film and screened it as part of the festival, and the response from the critical press was, to say the least, hostile. Crowe’s been a critic’s darling for so long that I’m sure Paramount was surprised, and very quickly, the word went out that there would be further editing, and what was shown was “unfinished.”
The thing is, when Harry was here in LA, it was about two weeks before the Toronto Film Festival, and we saw that cut of the film, which looked pretty darn finished to me. It was the day after the final color timed print came out of the lab, and when we saw it, there was no talk to us about further editing or works in progress. It makes me wonder now when that idea took root. Now that I’ve seen both versions, the cuts that were made feel arbitrary to me, and in at least one case, counterproductive. I’ve got a feeling that anyone who was going to hate this film before isn’t going to like the short cut more, while people who do like the film may end up with some unanswered questions that the longer version handled better.
And let’s go ahead and get something else out of the way before we really get into it. Since the first synopsis of the film came out, there have been inevitable comparisons to GARDEN STATE. More irony, since Zach Braff so obviously used Crowe’s earlier films as one of his stylistic templates when making his movie. There are certain similarities that are hard to deny. In both films, the death of a parent compels the main character to make a trip, and they end up falling in love with a free-spirited girl while dealing with their reactions to the death. But aside from those broad strokes and the great soundtracks, they’re far more different than they are alike.
GARDEN STATE, for example, has a distinctly skanky world view, what with all the drug use and the grave robbing and the spying on hookers in hotel rooms. The family in GARDEN STATE is hopelessly broken, and has been for a long time, more along the lines of an AMERICAN BEAUTY/DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES smiling on the outside/dying on the inside sort of a thing.
ELIZABETHTOWN’s got a whole different vibe, much warmer from the very start. Even with the idea of suicide playing an important role in the first reel. It’s a film about learning to look forward in your life instead of looking back, and it’s about a family bound by love that has to redefine itself when an important piece is suddenly missing. It’s not a film about overcoming dysfunction; instead, it’s about remembering what’s really important and embracing it.
One of the biggest questions about the film for me going in had to do with Orlando Bloom. Anytime someone wins the genetic lottery, their talent can be taken for granted, and it’s been easy for him to blend into large ensembles for LORD OF THE RINGS or TROY or PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN without ever having to carry the full weight of a movie. In this film, Orlando’s got no place to hide. His voice-over runs through the entire movie, and he’s in pretty much every scene.
So... how is he? Count me among the convinced. There’s an open approachability to his performance that won me over right away. As the film opens, Drew Baylor (Bloom) is on his way to see Phil (Alec Baldwin), the owner of the Nike-like running shoe company that Drew works for. Drew’s a designer whose first major product, the Spasmotica, has just been recalled. As he walks through the corporate headquarters, everyone gives him that same look... amazed he would even show up, embarrassed about what’s happened. All Drew can say as he walks past everyone is, “I’m fine,” like a drowning man holding onto a life preserver. So much of what happens in that opening sequence is non-verbal, especially once he ends up face-to-face with Phil. This is one of Alec Baldwin’s trademark killer cameos, a ten-minute role that mixes menace and mirth quite effectively. He tries to impress upon Drew the magnitude of the loss the company is facing.
I’ve read several reviews that started to rip into the film’s reality during this sequence, and I guess if you’re already checking out by this point, the film’s just not going to work for you. I think it’s all pretty funny stuff. I particularly like when he shows Drew all the programs that are going to have to be cut because of all the lost money. “This is my basketball team.” Then there’s that looooooooooooong Baldwin pause. “They don’t even know yet.” Even better is his Global Environmental Watchdog group, in a giant mission control-style room with screens showing images of pandas and eagles. “We could have saved the planet.” This is what real failure feels like, whether this is “real” or not. Crowe captures the feeling with surgical precision and wrings some real laughs and discomfort out of it.
Drew plans to kill himself, and again... I’ve read reviews where people mumble and grumble about the device that Drew rigs up to do the job. Remember... he’s an engineer... a guy who makes things... and his first creation just died on the table. This is a grand gesture. And even funnier, take note of the moment the knife drops out of the tape. Drew can’t even get this machine right. It’s funny stuff. The film takes its first sharp right turn when Drew is interrupted by the news that his father is dead. He was away from home, visiting the family back in Kentucky. Drew’s mother (Susan Sarandon) and sister (Judy Greer) ask Drew to fly to Elizabethtown to make arrangements for the body. Putting his own oblivion on hold for a few days, he goes. On the red-eye flight, he falls into a reluctant conversation with Claire (Kirsten Dunst), an overly-friendly flight attendant. What I like about the conception of her character in particular is how, even in that first scene, it’s obvious that all of her quirk and her perk is a cover for the essential transitory loneliness of what she does for a living. When Drew finally reaches Elizabethtown, he runs right into the middle of his entire extended family, and much of the film deals with the way the larger family has always viewed Drew and his immediate family, the “California Baylors... from California.” Right away, cousin Jessie (Paul Schneider) takes Drew under his wing. If you’ve ever seen David Gordon Green’s GEORGE WASHINGTON or (especially) ALL THE REAL GIRLS, you’re already familiar with Schneider’s work, and he’s great here as a guy who is dealing with his own esteem issues, making him a great emotional anchor for Drew.
From the moment Drew steps out of his rental car, one thing that Crowe gets absolutely right is the South. I grew up in Tennessee and Florida, and I had family in Alabama and Arkansas. Even the sound of the South is exactly right... something that you never forget once you’ve lived there, and when you hear it on the soundtrack, it’s almost a chemical thing. I could suddenly remember the exact humidity, the smell of the summer. Drew feels battered from all sides at first, caught between what his mother and sister want and what all of his father’s other relatives want, and in his desperation to find one friendly ear, he reaches out to Claire, calling her on her cell phone. This phone call, which takes up something like fifteen minutes of screen time, is one of the key moments in the film, one of those universally true things that Crowe’s so good at, and many people will identify with it, with that long night on the phone where you totally feel someone else out, getting to know them, talking about everything and anything. Again... a lot of what happens over the course of the sequence is non-verbal, and Bloom and Dunst make me believe and invest in the budding connection between them.
More than any other film he’s made... even SINGLES or ALMOST FAMOUS... this film leans on its soundtrack to help paint in some key emotional connections, and it walks that fine line between inspiration and self-parody. What makes it work for me is simply the wit and imagination of many of the choices. “My Father’s Gun” is one of those songs that seem to have been written for the movie, the fit is so perfect. Lindsey Buckingham’s “Big Love” is propulsive at just the right moment. I love Drew’s cell phone and the Temptations riff that eventually comes back during the closing credits. And as much as I like the song selections, the real glue of the film is Nancy Wilson’s score. I loved it. Simple, melodic, emotional without being overbearing. One of the moments that seems to cause the biggest outrage comes when Drew visits the motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Sure enough, Crowe fires up “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” by U2, and I’ve had many people tell me that the moment makes them cringe. Now, more than ever, though, with iPods and other MP3 players out there, music’s more portable than ever. I’m willing to bet that song’s been played at that spot thousands of times.
Is it obvious? Sure. But that song is married to our thoughts about MLK just like the “I Have A Dream” speech is, just like that motel. This is what our pop culture does to us. It makes these connections, hardwires them. Maybe it’s not the most adventurous moment in the film, but it strikes me as almost embarrassingly honest in terms of how we really behave.
In fact, that’s a pretty good word to keep in mind for a lot of ELIZABETHTOWN. Embarrassing. And not in a bad way. It’s not something that many filmmakers are willing to address in their work, because so much of modern filmmaking seems to be obsessed with being “cool.” It’s appropriate here, though, because dealing with your family can certainly be embarrassing at times, no matter how much you love them. Dealing with your own emotional responses to extreme situations can be embarrassing. Falling in love and letting your guard down... ripe with the possibility of abject embarrassment. The memorial for Drew’s father brings all of these ideas together in one big scene and embraces it fully, and once you get past that initial discomfort, what remains is abandon... pure celebration.
I love John Toll’s work in this film. He made his rep on films like THE THIN RED LINE and LEGENDS OF THE FALL and BRAVEHEART... epics. His work with Crowe on his last three films has allowed Toll to do something very different, though, and this is a film that’s all about emotion and the spaces between people, a warm movie, a quintessentially American movie, especially once it hits the road. It’s not flashy work, but it’s great. I also have to give praise to My Morning Jacket, the band that appears in the film as Ruckus, which was cousin Jessie’s band at one point. They reunite for an orgiastic cover of “Freebird” during Mitch’s memorial that marks the second great use of that song in a film this year.
If there’s one thing about the film that I don’t think works, it’s the Susan Sarandon storyline. The cutaways to her tap dancing lessons or wrestling with the car don’t strike me as true, and they’re not funny enough to work as sitcom. It’s only once Sarandon shows up at the memorial that her performance finally comes into focus, and I think it would have been stronger if this was the only time we really got to see her, if she’d only been mentioned and discussed up until that point.
After all, she’s the woman who stole Mitch away from his family. She’s the one who got him to move all the way out to California. She knows that when she shows up, she’s going to be judged. She overcompensates her ass off once she hits that stage, trying to show the family what it was that made Mitch love her for all those years, and that idea is a great one. The scene works better in theory than in practice, though, because so much of the rest of her performance seems too arch, too forced. I also think that Jessica Biehl could have been trimmed completely and never missed, since her character feels like a toothless rehash of Kelly Preston’s role in JERRY MAGUIRE.
There’s a subplot running through most of the film about a couple, Chuck and Cindy, who have booked most of the hotel for their wedding. Drew and Claire’s interactions with Chuck and Cindy are funny and they’re played broad, but there’s something real about them which really sells it. Crowe pays attention to all of his supporting cast, making sure he provides moments of grace for such great character actors as Bruce McGill, Loudon Wainwright, Gailard Sartain, and Paula Deen. He’s got to make sure his whole cast works to fully sell the notion of the extended family. He doesn’t try to offer every single person an epiphany, although I did really love the scene where Drew helps cousin Jessie calm down his son, Sampson, and a whole room full of unruly kids. The videotape they watch is one of the greatest things I’ve seen in a theater this year, and if it’s from a real series of videos, I’m buying them for my own kid. Now.
In the end, this all comes back to Drew and two key relationships. He has to resolve his feelings about his father’s death before he can move forward with Claire. As Chuck says at one point, “Death and life... side-by-side... separated by a thin thread.” It’s big stuff for Crowe to write about, and the fact that it’s not all neatly connected and wrapped up feels right to me. ELIZABETHTOWN is joyous and sloppy and frustrating at times but ultimately very satisfying, all of it jumbled up together. It’s the kind of film that may make you reflect on your own connections to your family. For me, it drove home one point loud and clear: I’m not ready for my own father to die. I’ll never be ready for that. All I can do with the time we’ve still got together is try to spend more of it with him and appreciate every minute of it.
I’ll be back later today with my reviews of GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (expanding wider today from its limited release last weekend) and DOMINO, which hits screens everywhere this weekend. I’ll say this much... I don’t think Harry and I are going to see eye-to-eye on one of them. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
