Contributor Movie Review: Elizabethtown

Elizabethtown
Directed by Cameron Crowe
Ingram Entertainment, 2005

Have you ever been alone in your car with the music up, maybe at a busy intersection or heading out of town at nightfall with a duffel in the trunk, and felt like your life—your story, your inner world, and the world around you--was soundtracked? Let’s say you’re already in a state of angst or mild vexation. The basic idea drumming in your mind is, What’s it all mean? What’s it all (me, friends, jobs, family, etc.) add up to? You’re coming home from work. You’ve got Joseph Arthur’s “In the Sun” cranked, or maybe some Sarah McLachlan (“Good to Me”?) or Indigo Girls. Ok, not Indigo Girls, but you get the idea—a song or artist you know will only mimic, if not indulge and enhance, your current condition. You begin to experience irrational feelings of sadness and self-importance, and your thoughts verge toward a kind of ill-gotten empathy for the exquisite complexity of our lives: Everybody hurts (sometimes). How tragic and beautiful we all are!

Maybe it’s just me.

And there are other songs and moods your soundtrack might include. You’ve got music to “chill” by, music that gets you hopping, music that brings you down, music that says, “I’m carefree,” music that floats you, music that floors you. That’s the challenge of a mix tape (well, not tape anymore, but whatever): You need to take the listener on a journey, and you know the journey isn’t so much through the lyric content of the songs, thought that’s part of it, but through tunnels of self, of memory, of dreams.

Follow me so far?

This whole thing—the soundtracking of our lives—has got to be a late 20th Century innovation. Before recorded music, and before that recorded music became portable (i.e. the advent of car radio, walkmen, ipods), and before movie directors began heavily emphasizing the film score, it seems to me this would have been unlikely. It doesn’t help that increasingly directors appear to be abandoning traditional symphonic film scores for pop music—music that, when we hear it in a film, echoes previous experiences with that song or predicts others we will have.

The problem is, of course, that while these experiences may be part of the “real” soundtrack of our lives, and we might enjoy them (I certainly do), they are essentially escapist in nature. I have students that stroll from class to class with earphones on, and no doubt they spend a good deal of the time I don’t see—in their dorms, in the park, lounging in bed, driving, even eating—doing the same. My fear is that they, and that we and that I, will miss most of the real soundtrack: the birdsongs I can’t identify; the dialogue I can’t overhear; the troubled, unfocused thoughts I’d like to numb; the lives people beyond my windshield are living out day after day. You know, if I drive by a construction worker holding a “Slow” sign and I’m “soundtracking,” I think I’m more likely to appropriate what I observe and use it to my own self-absorbed ends. I might not really care about this guy no matter what, but there’s a chance I will if I can give him my attention for the few seconds I see him without the gloss of the song I’m imbibing.

What does this all have to do with Elizabethtown, directed by Cameron Crowe? Only this: Elizabethtown is an homage to the soundtracked life. A confirmed pop-rock junkie, Crowe (who you’ll remember from Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, a loosely autobiographical account of Crowe’s days as a young journalist for Rolling Stone) fills two hours of movie, and about 45 minutes of script, with music. I’d bet—I haven’t looked this up—that nearly fifty songs appear in some form in the film. I had fun ticking them off: “Big Love,” Fleetwood Mac; Wheat’s “Don’t I Hold You”; “Learning to Fly,” Tom Petty, and on and on. You’ve got Elton, you’ve got My Morning Jacket, you’ve got Kathleen Edwards and Ryan Adams. And those are just the ones I could name on the spot.

The problem isn’t just the lack of a substantial script. It’s that all this soundtracking has the effect of making all characters and plot points bow the knee to Orlando Bloom’s protagonist, Drew Baylor. To be fair, Drew’s hung up on himself from the start: He’s about to become a monumental failure at his job—the shoe he’s designed turns out to be the footwear equivalent of an Edsel—and tries to kill himself with a butcher knife-rigged stationary bike before his sister calls to tell him his dad has died. But instead of critiquing Drew’s emotional onanism, the movie only affirms it. For instance, when Drew visits his father’s extended family in Kentucky (Elizabethtown, where the film gets its name), we’d like to see the movie plumb some of the evident tensions: Drew is from Oregon, he’s well-educated, successful—at least to this point—young, good looking, and in a state of shock over the loss of his father; the myriad people he meets are provincial, good-natured, resentful about Drew’s mom “stealing” his dad away to the Pacific Northwest, and pretty much fulfill all the aw-shucks Southern exaggeration you can conjure. Should be plenty of grist for the mill. But Crowe cops out. He gives us a few stylish, quirky interchanges, and a bunch of sequences where we watch people talking and eating and laughing and crying and but don’t hear any of it: We hear Patty Griffin or Lindsay Buckingham, or whoever it was at that moment. Ditto for Drew’s weekend romance with Claire Colburn (ever perky Kirsten Dunst), and his aloof relationship with his sister (Judy Greer) and mother (I won’t begin to discuss Susan Sarandon’s ridiculous memorial service eulogy/dance in honor of her husband, just before a band plays “Freebird” and accidentally lights the hotel ballroom on fire with a paper mache bird that wings out on a cable over the mourners).

At Claire’s urging, Drew takes a road trip, scheduled to the last detail by Claire, who disingenuously suggests Drew work through his grief on his own, then call her. (In fact, she’s in control of him the whole time, pulling his strings, and by the end even waiting for him--*surprise*--to arrive at a county fair where a vendor is actually selling his doomed shoe, the Spasmodica. We’re supposed to believe that Drew experiences a kind of breakthrough on this road trip—the sort of moment Crowe gave us in Almost Famous when everyone on a band’s tour bus sings along to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”—but it doesn’t work here. Drew’s father, now ashes in a safely-seatbelted urn, rides shotgun, and at one point we see Drew talking to the cremated paterfamilias. He’s hitting his hands on the steering wheel, laughing, weeping, motioning (watch where you’re going!), etc. Do we hear any of this? No. We hear yet another song, no doubt appropriate to how we should be feeling at this moment.

And so we’re left in the cold. We’re the construction worker with the “Slow” sign, but instead of waving Drew by, we’re forced to watch him for 123 minutes. He’s in his own soundtrack, we’re excluded.

Reviewed by Martin B. Cockroft
"Martoon" rides a red wagon down a killer Pennsylvania hill, composes songs for his daughters, and cooks to-die-for Thai food.