Elizabethtown - A Mess of Confusion Without a Plan

Cameron Crowe's new film Elizabethtown is about a young suicidal man (Orlando Bloom) who is about to kill himself when he gets a call saying that his father had died. He decides that he will return home for the funeral and will afterwards kill himself. However "his plan" is interrupted by a stewardess named Claire (Kirsten Dunst) who becomes intrusive in his life.

I am not going to continue summarizing this film because it will cause me to give away the ending. The film is as confusing as it is emotionless. The entire film was about how he felt bad that he never spent time with his father. I never once related to any of the characters.

The acting on Orlando Bloom's part was alright, but it didn't give the film what it needed to be great. Kirsten Dunst also didn't do a fantastic job. I could understand her emotions better than I could understand Bloom's, however she kept changing her accent. It started off sounding southern, then it changed to Northeastern, then it changed back to Southern, and by the end she had no accent at all. In fact the best actor in the film, Alec Baldwin, had a character that appeared for about ten minutes of this two hour film. The characters were not well developed. There were many characters that had no significance in the film, but they kept coming back. Again, a poor choice on Crowe's part.

The writing itself was all over the place. It seemed as though Cameron Crowe took eight separate ideas for eight different movies and he stuck them all together. The film was light hearted, but he would often try to slip in a comedic scene. These scenes were funny, but they were very random and seemed cartoonish compared to the rest of the film. The films ending also needed work. Again, it seemed like Crowe had multiple ideas for an ending and then he decided to put them all together.

In short, the plot was overdeveloped and the characters were underdeveloped. The film itself was sloppily made and was utterly confusing. This film may be entertaining for a little while, but the entire story line gets old fast. It's a messy movie from beginning to end.

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