Elizabethtown

There’s a group sport aspect to piling on a movie, a mob mentality thing. It’s hard to always know why one movie is tagged as “it,” but Elizabethtown was. (I’ve heard some critics say it was because of a bad longer cut at the Toronto Film Festival, where all the critics saw it, and then never bothered to see the final cut, and just ran with the review of the — announced as such — unfinished product.)

The truth is, this isn’t a bad movie. It’s not, say, Con Air or Deep Blue Sea or Instinct. But it’s also not a great movie, the kind that Cameron Crowe is capable of, like Almost Famous or Singles. (Or even Jerry “Show me the money!” Maguire.)

It features, like all of Crowe’s movies, sharp dialogue (although Crowe may be a touch too in love with it here), quirky characters, some clever bits (Claire’s road trip map is simply awesome) and, as always, amazing, wonderful, terrific music.

Unfortunately, this time, the whole is equal to a touch less than the sum of its parts. Orlando Bloom is OK. Susan Sarandon is great, but seems to have dropped in from a different movie. Kirsten Dunst is alternately wonderful and exasperating.

Elizabethtown is probably one more severe edit away from being a great, tight, touching movie, the kind Crowe is eminently capable of.

But this DVD isn’t quite it.

A recommended rental for fans of Crowe or Dunst, and stalker-level fans of Bloom.

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