Elizabethtown (2005)
Directed by Cameron Crowe
Drew Baylor is fired after causing his shoe company to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. To make matters worse, he's also dumped by his girlfriend. On the verge of ending it all, Drew gets a new lease on life when he returns to his family's small Kentucky hometown after his father dies. Along the way, he meets a flight attendant with whom he falls in love.
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4 films that influenced Elizabethtown
What critics say influenced Elizabethtown
The collisions contain a pleasant Local Hero–meets–Harold and Maude vibe, which Crowe has said he was after.
It's as if Crowe wanted to channel Ruth Gordon's elderly free spirit from Harold and Maude.
If Zach Braff’s “Garden State” no longer feels like the generational alarm clock it did in 2004, that’s because “Elizabethtown” and “The Last Kiss” (also with Braff) made it easier to hit snooze on poor-me whines of twentysomething males in quarter-life crises.
The plot might remind viewers of last year's indie hit "Garden State," but Crowe is aiming at a mainstream audience, which makes his challenge that much greater.
Reviews of Elizabethtown will begin in one of two ways: The reviewer will compare Cameron Crowe's latest to the bizarrely similar Garden State, or she'll quip on the opening voiceover by Orlando Bloom, a rumination on the difference between "failure" and a "fiasco."
If it sounds familiar, it should: Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown is, for all intents and purposes, Garden State 2. But where the delightful Garden State showed that its auteur, Zach Braff, is a disciple of pillowy pop-music patchworks like Say Anything and Jerry Maguire, Crowe's cloying Elizabethtown little more than a phoned-in date movie makes it clear the pupil has outshone his professor.
No matter how you look at it, the story line is a Hollywoodized rip-off of Zach Braff's vastly superior Garden State.
It's no "Jerry Maguire," but it is head and shoulders above "Vanilla Sky."
The film starts with the sudden downfall of a one-time boy genius (see "Jerry Maguire"), followed by a failed suicide (see "Vanilla Sky") and a cross-country trip that becomes an odyssey of self-discovery (see "Almost Famous").
But it's as if, after veering away from familiar territory with the thriller "Vanilla Sky" (an interesting attempt that deserved more praise than it got), he's returning to a greatest-hits format, reprising themes and even scenes from his previous movies.
I would like to say it's a return to form for Cameron Crowe, who followed the charming adenoidal humanism of Almost Famous with the haphazard mind play of Vanilla Sky � but, well, sorry.
No less personal, Elizabethtown is supposed to be based on Cameron Crowe's experiences dealing with his father's death, though I posit Vanilla Sky's critical reception may have been just as strong a stimulus.
''Big Fish" was Tim Burton on Paxil, vacant and even-tempered.