Ray Pride

The trailers pretty much give it away: corporate hotshot Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) has an epic, billion-dollar failure, fiasco and flame-out just as his father dies; dispatched by his family to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to retrieve his father's ashes, he meets a set of epic dimples attached to Claire, a perky, pesky flight attendant played by Kirsten Dunst.

Constructed around several large set pieces, Cameron Crowe again tinkers with tone in "Elizabethtown." He premiered a longer version at Venice and Toronto. Not altogether inappropriately, considering the kinds of stories Crowe tells as a filmmaker, the most abusive and condescending of notices were filled with the sort of vitriol you'd expect from a spurned lover. But a couple hours before premiering the movie at the opening night of the Chicago International Film Festival, Crowe's content. "It's the [cut] I would have done anyway. What I guess was surprising was that work-in-progress can mean other things. It can mean I'm not going to release it, or it's a troubled movie, or I want to protect myself. But I really believe in the movie and it's made for all the right reasons. The story's not written yet. It comes out in ten days and we'll see what happens. There's something that the movie does to audiences and it's a rarely a passive reaction. I stopped reading 'em at a certain point. I've learned from bad and good reviews."

Crowe, being an old-fashioned kind of storyteller who wants to frame his movies with "premises," opens "Elizabethtown" with several scenes that make one uneasy--Billy Wilder notions on Ridley Scott scale--but once you're into the movie, these are the clotheslines, and there is finery.

My ears perked up as well as the word "Kentucky" (where I'm from) is spoken of like a place unconscionably exotic, like "Constantinople" or "Ulaan Bator." But once on the ground in the Commonwealth, Crowe finds his movie. Part of it is working with cinematographer John Toll. "He likes to honor the face, the story you can tell from the face. Sometimes it's not all about beauty. It's fun to have a guy with that much soul [making] the frame, working with you to tell the story. `Vanilla Sky' had, certainly, its own interesting... birth. But I learned so much visually. I'm challenged by [him], how can I tell the story more visually, in a complete way?"

Aside from the expected song-packed soundtrack, Crowe's good at finding the right moments for the right sounds, too, the low of freight trains and fall's first crickets.

The central set piece, an extended courtship via cell phone by Drew and Claire after they've met, while the pair move through intimate spaces--hers, the approach to her life, into her home and a warm bath, his, the dislocation of a Louisville hotel--is sublimely what Crowe does best, caterwauling posturing and foolishness and self-revelation in the face of the improbability of truest love. Claire's "You want to have a beer over the phone"? is not "I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen" or "You had me at..." but it is sweet in Dunst's mid-South-with-a-dash-of-Mississippi-magnolia drawl. Better still is their meeting later, driving to meet in the middle of their distance in the midst of a forest on a misty Kentucky sand-colored sunrise--"I see your headlights..."; "I see your red hat..."; "There you are."

"The thing that I liked about this movie," Crowe says, "the things that were going to be different, things that had to be dealt with had to be the long phone call, the road trip at the end, the long monologue from [Drew's] mother [Susan Sarandon, doing strange stand-up at a memorial service]."

The road trip, a daring detour that sets Drew and his father's urn across a landscape of universal grief and what memory you hold--there's a bold citation of the haunting Oklahoma City children's memorial--is the oddest turn in an American movie since the end of Spike Lee's "The 25th Hour." "Mathematically, it was going to be tough. I knew it would take a long time sifting and shifting to find a rhythm. I didn't want to cut that long phone call down to nothing. My dream was that someone would come to me and say, `Hey I noticed how behavior changes, how you're confessing to a stranger and idealizing your life while [also] being yourself while you're unseen by them. Then you get your courage up to be seen by them and you realize they're still a stranger."

John Toll works wonders with the landscape of faces here, and Dunst has never seemed as sunny, and that's saying something. Claire has a willful dorkiness, not tomboyish, but a kook, Fran Kubelik brash, like the young Shirley MacLaine, beaming, parading in floral granny dresses and skirts and flip-flops. "I'm impossible to forget but I'm hard to remember," Claire insists, pestering, pesky. Crowe grins. "Sometimes you don't know you need a people person but that people person knows how to find you when you're in need."

"Elizabethtown" opens Friday.

(2005-10-11)

Also by Ray Pride

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