‘I’m impossible to forget, but I’m hard to remember...’
How did it come to this? Cameron Crowe, on the back of Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous and Vanilla Sky, somehow found himself writing and directing Elizabethtown. A film so bad, it’s almost impossible to believe that it is directed by one of the most iconic filmmakers of the ’90s. Perhaps most famous now for being the film responsible for the phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl (coined by film critic Nathan Rabin in his review for The A.V. Club), Elizabethtown was derided upon release and has aged horribly in the intervening years. Where did it all go wrong?
Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) is a shoe designer on the verge of suicide because he designed a bad shoe. Then his dad dies. Then he meets Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst), the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in question, and she persuades him that life is worth living again.
Where to start with this one. Well, firstly, I think we can all admit now that absolutely nobody is interested in watching Orlando Bloom in anything. He’s the most boring thing about the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, he hasn’t made anything remotely watchable for decades, and he’s already begun to fade into cinematic obscurity. His performance here, especially in comparison to little Tommy Cruise in Crowe’s previous two films, is genuinely laughable. There isn’t a single moment within this film where Bloom manages to be sweet, or funny, or even likable. It’s an utterly nothing performance from a blank page of an actor. Dunst is awful, also. Sure, she’s battling against how badly written her character is, but she absolutely fails to elevate the material, and I say this as a huge fan of Dunst. The two share zero chemistry, seem faintly embarrassed throughout, and I couldn’t wait for the film to finish so I’d never have to spend anymore time in their company. It doesn’t end there. Paul Schneider and Susan Sarandon are also bad. The latter hamstrung by a lengthy eulogy scene which is genuinely painful to sit through (for all the wrong ones) while the former never threatens to move his character beyond the realms of caricature.
If I were being kind, I could point out that the soundtrack is still pretty good (one thing you can always rely on Crowe for is a decent soundtrack), but that is the only redeeming feature here. This is what happens when a filmmaker learns all the wrong lessons and indulges all of their worst impulses. It’s possibly the worst drop off in terms of quality in cinema history. Now, let’s never speak of this again.
