Review: Elizabethtown

Posted by: Tom Milroy  •  October 14, 2005 @ 11:59am

Filed under: Reviews

Have you ever been to Elizabethtown? I have. Jerry Maguire lives there. You remember the famous line from that film don't you? "You had me at Elizabethtown."

Director Cameron Crowe shows his sensitive side in Elizabethtown by having his star travel home to Elizabethtown, Kentucky for his father's funeral. Drew baylor (Orlando Bloom) learns about his dad's death just after losing his job at a giant shoe company. His "fiasco" of a failure costs the company close to a billion dollars. This is not a happy guy. On the way home, he meets the annoyingly perky Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst). You know the two of them are going to get together, so we're left with nearly 2 hours to kill.

There are some great performances here from actors in a supporing role. Susan Sarandon is a stand-out as Drew's mom. Alec Baldwin, as usual, is super as Drew's boss. As is the case in all of Cameron Crowe's movies, the soundtrack is tasty. It features songs by Elton John, Tom Petty, and Nancy Wilson of Heart â€" she always gets to work on Cameron's movies (they're husband and wife).

I was really looking forward to this movie, so it was a bit of a disappointment. It didn't seem to have much momentum. Perhaps Claire said it best: "I'm hard to remember, but impossible to forget."