Elizabethtown: Critic Reviews

Think of Elizabethtown as Cameron Crowe's rambling amateur travelogue, one from a well-liked professional filmmaker momentarily so distracted by private notes scrawled on his souvenir map that he gets lost en route to telling his story.

Cameron Crowe's tale of romance and redemptions struggles to sustain a tone of bittersweet whimsy, but its emotions are in the end as undercooked as its ideas.

What ends up on screen is a jumbled, if good-natured, mess.

To swallow Elizabethtown without experiencing a sharp tummy cramp of disbelief, you have to accept Orlando Bloom as a tormented soul.

The movie feels long and strangely derivative of [Crowe's] other, better work.

It's not a fiasco, but as the voiceover admits, anyone can fail.

Whether Elizabethtown proves to be Crowe's Johnstown or just a run-of- the-mill flood, it's still a soggy mess.

The trailer for Elizabethtown hits on every major plot point in the film and is roughly 121 minutes shorter. See that instead.

The film's golden moments run the gamut from warmhearted to satirical, but a sense of incompletion hampers their effect.

Plot development in Elizabethtown comes purely because the script says it must, not because the actors or the story make it seem probable.

Leaves one adrift on a raft of morose questions. How could this vacuous movie have got made? Didn't anyone at Paramount, which paid for the film, read the script? And also: What in the world has happened to Cameron Crowe?

In its trimmed version, Elizabethtown is nowhere near one of Crowe's great films (like Almost Famous), but it is sweet and good-hearted and has some real laughs.

It dares you to care about any of its people or incidents or sentiments, foisting the characters' little comic quirks on the audience like they're fenced goods.

The hero's nuclear family and kooky rural relatives are so sketchily conceived that none of the intended comedy works, and the balance of the movie is given over to one of Crowe's sugary romances.

Not even the soundtrack can save this Crowe effort.

Just as we're reaching for our coats so we can beat the rush to the parking lot, the movie launches a new chapter.

This, folks, is not entertainment.

A dreary, self-indulgent, overscripted train wreck of a film.

Lacks the narrative drive one finds in the classic comedies of Preston Sturges, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder, whom Crowe always seems to try to emulate.

Choppily edited and only sporadically funny.

But as messy, unfocused and rambling as this is, fundamentally flawed as any movie about loss that doesn't let its characters or its viewers feel that loss, it's still a most-enjoyable mess to sit through, a Southern-fried Garden State.

Elizabethtown isn't a refuge for the soul, it's a dead end for the senses.

This is a bona fide, absolute, unmitigated fiasco.

Elizabethtown never quite feels like itself, whatever that self might be; it's as if another, subtly but significantly different movie were desperately trying to break through its skin.

Elizabethtown needed a raffish, Preston Sturges-esque ensemble to offset the corn.