‘Elizabethtown’ Looks at Life and Death
VENICE, Italy – Most of what happens in “Elizabethtown,” will probably never happen to you √≥ but some could, and that is the hook in the Cameron Crowe film that debuted Sunday at the Venice Film Festival.
Starting with Elizabethtown, Ky., itself, a real place between Louisville, Ky., and Nashville, Tenn., the movie is packed with very real experiences: sudden death, career failure, girlfriends who ditch their men, men who ditch their girlfriends, people who realize after loved ones are gone that they never took the time to really know them.
“Elizabethtown” was being screened, out of competition, midway through the festival, which ends Sept. 10.
The festival opened with directors ó George Clooney, Ang Lee and Steven Soderbergh among them ó taking pains to deny that their movies here were designed to deliver political statements.
Crowe, however, took the occasion to proclaim his movie’s message.
“Elizabethtown” is about “the obsession with success and failure that we see in America,” the director told reporters. “But life comes along and trumps that in a big way.”
In the film, Kirsten Dunst, playing Claire, a cheerful airline hostess, delivers the same message.
But Dunst is so persistenly charming, her lead foil, Orlando Bloom, so genuinely engaging and the plot so offbeat entertaining that viewers can still have fun despite the in-your-face recipe for happiness while finding yourself.
Bloom, the British actor whose other credits include “The Lord of the Rings” and “Troy,” mastered the challenge of absorbing the accents and tics of Americans ranging from West Coast career climbers to down-home folk in America’s heartland.
Bloom plays Drew, whose father dies while visiting family in Kentucky. Drew is still staggering under the news that the shoe he spent eight years perfecting for the shoe company where he works has a defect that could cost the firm nearly $1 billion. His mother dispatches him to Elizabethtown to take care of his father’s remains, and the rediscovery of self gets under way to the aroma of freshly baked smoked ham.
The film’s creators assembled a cast of extras who look like people we could know. At least one we do: Playing Drew’s exuberant, welcoming Aunt Dora who is always cooking something on the stove is Paula Deen of Food Network’s “Paula’s Home Cooking.”
Susan Sarandon is Drew’s mom, a widow who thinks she needs to be reborn and steals a long moment in the film with an unusual eulogy about her husband.
No heartland film would be complete without a road trip, and Drew’s metamorphosis comes as he drives cross-country, stopping in real-life tourist attractions and monuments, including the memorial in Oklahoma City to victims of the 1995 bombing.
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