He Had Me at Hello

Sometimes a movie just gets to you. It opens your eyes for a moment to the possibilities of love and life, reminding you what a weirdly artificial, hermit-crab shell-of-the-mind you've been living in. It challenges you to walk out of the theater and do something bold--knock over a trashcan, bust open the doors of perception, something like that.

Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe's latest romantic comedy, did that to me. The thing is--and it has happened before with Crowe--I knew exactly what he was doing. Sure, for a good hour or so I held out the possibility that he would take this relationship in a different emotional direction than he did in his previous films. (I'll leave Vanilla Sky out of it, since that was a remake.) But he didn't. I could hear the clicks as he pushed the buttons, and feel the shudder as the cranks kicked into gear. This is hardly the subtlest of romantic buildups. And the couple, played by Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, is perhaps the least believable of any Crowe has invented. Still, because Crowe went all out with it, because something genuine and maybe even a little desperate shone through all the cracks in character and plot, I was moved--by the neediness of the attempt, by the way Crowe reaches out at the end of the film and essentially asks the world to be more beautiful.

Afterward, I walked out of the theater and did something risky. And I flopped. (Let's just say I didn't complete him.) Apparently real life is not a Cameron Crowe movie. Real people are not Cameron Crowe people. And so I have learned another lesson about the power of cinema: Avoid heavy machinery while under the influence of an insinuatingly whimsical, pseudo-realistic, musically savvy, semi-hip urban romantic comedy with an inspiring message about the beauty of existence. (Would I do it all again? Probably.)

Plot-wise, Elizabethtown is a retread of Crowe's Jerry Maguire, more or less, with some father-son stuff thrown in. You have the self-involved West Coast yuppie (Drew, played by Bloom). You have his emasculating career crisis, though Crowe humorously ups the ante this time: Instead of merely being fired like Jerry, this guy gets fired and costs his company a billion dollars. (He's a shoe designer whose highly conceptual new running shoe, called Spasmotica, gets recalled.) You have the career-climbing about-to-be-ex-girlfriend with whom he actually has some chemistry (Jessica Biel). You have the wacky supporting character--this time it's his mom, played by Susan Sarandon. You have the hero's journey of self-discovery: a trip to his ancestral home in Kentucky, where his father has just died unexpectedly while visiting relatives. (Most of the film takes place in Kentucky.) And finally, you have the girl: Claire (Dunst), a perky people-person flight attendant who helps our boy get through this challenging time.

I know I sound cynical, but Elizabethtown is packed with charm. That's how it does its evil work of turning suckers like me into cheesy flops.

 

From Fast Times at Ridgemont High (which he scripted) through Elizabethtown, Crowe's films betray a sympathy for human strangeness and suffering, although they rarely delve deeply or directly into the muck of it. You sense that those emotional depths are there, maybe just outside the frame--like the boom mic that appears during a front-porch scene in Jerry Maguire. Sometimes the depths are suggested by the better actors (e.g., Frances McDormand in Almost Famous), more often by music.

Watching a Crowe film, I want to blow on it somehow, as if to coax its glowing ember of whimsy and truth into a raging fire of weirdness, courage, and authenticity. I want his movies to be more rock 'n' roll, more like the music he chooses for them. The guy gets certain details so absofuckinlutely right on you actually go, Shit, I can't believe no one has ever made that joke or observation before in a movie. These moments of truth are a tonic to the Hollywood-battered movie fan; it feels healthy to see something close to the aesthetic and emotional subtleties of everyday life acknowledged on the big screen. Woody Guthrie said he didn't like any music that made people feel small, and part of Crowe yearns for that ethic, too.