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'Elizabethtown': Just plain creepy

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Judging from what's onscreen in "Elizabethtown," Cameron Crowe apparently came up with a really spectacular soundtrack and then remembered he had to attach a movie to it.

Thus, this hugely disappointing film, which goes beyond blunder into something akin to meltdown. A fiasco like this is simply not what we expect from the writer-director of "Almost Famous" and "Jerry Maguire."

Paramount Pictures

'Elizabethtown'

D-

The verdict: Take the nearest detour.

Director: Cameron Crowe
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Biel, Judy Greer
Run time: 133 minutes
Release date: Oct. 14, 2005
Rating: PG-13 for language and some sexual references.
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After a disastrous screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, Crowe reportedly went back to the editing room and cut 20 minutes.

He should've kept going.

The movie is supposedly semiautobiographical. Perhaps Crowe was simply too close to the material. But it's almost impossible to believe he didn't realize at some point this miscast, incoherent comedy wasn't working. At all.

Orlando Bloom, whose career is disappearing like the elves from Middle Earth ("Kingdom of Heaven" and this in the same year?), stars as Drew Baylor, a wunderkind in the competitive athletic shoe market enjoying a very pleasant West Coast life. Until, that is, his highly-touted, must-have new model self-destructs, causing his career to self-destruct as well and costing his company (run by Alec Baldwin in his Big Biz Bully mode) close to a billion dollars.

Drew's attempted suicide by exercycle is interrupted by a phone call. His father has unexpectedly died while visiting his hometown in Kentucky. (It's called... right you are!) His mom (Susan Sarandon) and his sister (Judy Greer) ask Drew to fly there and bring the body home for cremation.

Why Drew, who hasn't been close to his father in years? Because mom has gone into a suddenly-widowed whirl of lessons: tap dancing, cooking, you name it, and sis has to stay behind to make sure she doesn't add Dr. Kevorkian 101 to the list.

Or, more realistically, if they all go, there's no movie.

Easier mandated than done. Drew boards an empty plane and collides head-on with chirpy control-freak flight attendant, Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst). She's determined to Turn His life Around.

If she doesn't, all the folksy folks in Elizabethtown will. Crowe intends the place to be Mayberry moved west, populating it with adorable eccentrics who loved Drew's dad and are determined to love Drew, too. No matter how hard he fights them off.

But instead of drawing you in, the Elizabeth-ians frankly make you nervous, with their contrived quirkiness and colorful down-home gumption. There's the kid with the high-pitched tea-kettle scream and the cousin with a failed rock band and another cousin who supposedly looks just like Drew (the joke being, the cousin is hayseed ugly). And let's not forget the drunken (but friendly) revelers at a wedding being held in Drew's hotel.

Everyone's friendly in that manic, over-exaggerated way you used to see in the old "Li'l Abner" comic strip (with the exception of Paula Deen as a random aunt). Or as if they've moved over from Hazzard (as in "Dukes of"). In a word, they're creepy.

However, not as creepy as Dunst, who does a wretchedly written role wretchedly. She's so deadly she makes you yearn for Barbra Streisand's pushy free spirit in "What's Up, Doc?" Then there's Bloom, formerly My Favorite Elf. Devoid of his pointy ears, he's a total blank — like an extra in his own movie. And poor Sarandon ends up tap dancing to "Moon River" at the memorial service.

Be still, my gag reflex.