Elizabethtown

Elizabethtown is movie of the romantic comedy genre. It stars Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst.

Bloom plays an upwardly mobile sneaker designer who just made the most expensive blunder in the history of the business to the tune of a cool billion. Dunst is a kind hearted stewardess who befriends Bloom on a plane ride. The plot develops as Bloom flies to Elizabethtown, Kentucky to wrap up his recently deceased father's affairs.

The film has several notable scenes. These include their all night phone call, and the meeting with "the boss." The highlight of Elizabethtown is the cross country roadtrip towards the end with quite a bit of Americana thrown in. For the record, I had an atlas out trying to map out his route (I-40, I think).

What's holding back this film? First and foremost, like several other films I've seen recently, it really needed some serious editing. The first half of Elizabethtown is so painfully slow it put me to sleep the first time I saw it. If your DVD player can playback at 2x with audio, this is THE film to use it on. Quite frankly, on some scenes like the drawn out eulogies, it's not even fast enough. The other lesser weakness is that too many items were left undone. Maybe they were setting us up for a sequel, but the film should still stand on its own. What about his job? Can he fulfill his father's last wishes? What happens to the relationship? Perhaps if we had substantially trimmed it from the start we could have finished the tale to the point of some completion. As it stands, I was significantly unsettled at the end with no real conclusions.

I will summarize Elizabethtown as boredom, punctuated by brief excellence, but ending with an unresolved plot. This was one movie I made sure to return to Blockbuster before I owned it!

Overall Grade: C+