Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe's latest, follows Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) for what has to be the most eventful week in his life. Baylor works for a barely-disguised Nike (the CEO's name is Phil, and the company is based in Oregon). He is apparently a shoe designer who is personally responsible for a $972 million fiasco called the "Spasmodica," feted at the company, ignored by the public. After figuratively falling on his sword for a business magazine article, Drew heads back to his apartment to literally fall on a kitchen knife and end it all. A ringing cell phone changes everything.
On the phone is his sister, calling to let him know that his father had died on a trip back to his home, Elizabethtown, KY. Drew is asked to fly to Kentucky, pick up the ashes, and bring them home. Events in his father's hometown, and a borderline-crazy airline attendant, Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst), complicate those three simple tasks.
The story idea is appealing, a little reminiscent of Garden State, but without the medication. This part of the film is autobiographical for Crowe, and his affection for this side of his family, and the country, shows. Crowe avoids making fun of small-town, borderline-southern society, while still managing to present them as human.
Claire is clearly a little nuts, but not dangerously so, and she knows enough not to push but to lead. Even Claire's detailed scripting of Drew's closing roadtrip is more helpful than overbearing. (The roadtrip is a pleasant ending, but it seemed a little heavy on the politics, and occupies far too central a place in the movie's marketing given its actual length.) The chemistry between Bloom and Dunst is unmistakable. The two actors are likable on their own, and they work well together here.
Baylor's Kentucky relatives accept him as he is, knowing he won't be around long. But Drew is still recovering from his shoe-fiasco, so his character is a little too passive to pass judgment, anyway. As a result, there's mercifully little of the Big City vs. the Small-Town South that grates on actual Southerners.
And yet, other interactions don't seem quite right. Susan Sarandon plays Hollie Baylor, Drew's mom, and she reacts to her sudden widowhood with all enough self-absorption that we understand why all the Kentuckians think she lives in California. The stand-up performance she gives at her husband's memorial is so completely out of place, so completely about her and not him, that I found myself wondering exactly why it was supposed to win us over.
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