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| So
annoying together: (l-r) Dunst and Bloom in Elizabethtown. |
Fiasco
By
Shawn Stone
Elizabethtown
Directed
by Cameron Crowe
Cameron Crowe means well. The writer-director strives to create
a heartfelt cinema of big emotions drawn from life. He tells
stories about real people, not gadgets or special effects;
people who are caught in the middle of human situations that,
well, people tend to find themselves in. What kind of people?
The kind who love and laugh and hurt and cry. He gives them
quirky ways of talking, puts them in wacky situations, and
has them fall in love. He helps them find themselves, and,
in turn, the audience get in touch with their own humanness.
People like sports agent Jerry McGuire (Tom Cruise), in the
film of the same name, who is not a grasping slimeball, but
a loving fellow. Or Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) in Almost
Famous, who is emphatically not some groupie slut, but
a willowy, innocent rock & roll muse. Or Lloyd Dobler
(John Cusack) in Say Anything . . ., who is most certainly
not a batshit-crazy stalker, but a devoted swain pursuing
his lady fair.
Forgive the sarcasm, but Crowe’s latest film, Elizabethtown,
is a total fiasco. Every sentimentalizing impulse he indulged
in those earlier films is taken to a grotesque extreme in
Elizabethtown. The characters are annoying, their motivations
are sitcom-simple and the story so weighted with meaning as
to be actor-proof: The actors can’t do a damn thing with it.
It’s so off-key, so lost, so mushy, that it calls into question
everything he’s done before. (Except Fast Times at Ridgemont
High, which was directed by Amy Heckerling. That’s still
untouched.)
You need to know the plot of Elizabethtown to get a
hint of why the film doesn’t work. Briefly, Drew (Orlando
Bloom) designs a catastrophically defective running shoe for
a Nike-esque company run by a quirky—there’s that word again—mogul
(Alec Baldwin). Drew’s mistake will cost the company $1 billion;
the fiasco results in the loss of his shallow (read: whore)
girlfriend (Jessica Biel) and his plunge into the depths of
a suicidal depression.
Then his dad dies.
At the behest of his spastic mom (Susan Sarandon), he goes
down south to Kentucky, where his dad died on a family visit,
to retrieve the body from those wacky—there’s that word
again—rednecks. On the flight, Drew meets Claire (Kirsten
Dunst), a chatty flight attendant who immediately takes a
shine to him. Her interest, in fact, seems to border on the
unreasonably obsessive. It’s creepy.
Anyway, Drew meets up with the happy Kentuckians, who are
as provincial as advertised (on the surface, natch);
his goal is to negotiate a couple of days in redneckland,
and then go back to his Pacific Northwest home to off himself.
Got that?
First, what in the hell could be so wrong with a sneaker that
a multinational corporation wouldn’t catch the mistake in
preproduction? Second, how are we supposed to believe that
Drew is suicidal when Crowe can’t stop himself from being
jokey about it? For a disciple of Billy Wilder, Crowe doesn’t
have a clue about what black humor is, let alone how to put
it into a scene. (Bloom, who is generally engaging here, clearly
couldn’t play suicidal.) And the nutty family shtick is so
tired it would embarrass Frank Capra. The film is tone-deaf
on every level.
Speaking of tone deaf, someone has got to keep the anal-retentive
filmmaker from cueing up every scene with some classic roots-rock
number. It’s annoying, and kills the natural mood of the scenes.
Crowe likes rock & roll; we freakin’ get it. Now knock
it off.
The film goes on and on, turning into a road trip that incorporates
visits to—I shit you not—the Lorraine Motel, where Martin
Luther King, Jr., was assassinated (cue the U2 on the soundtrack),
and the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. Stupefying, offensive
and 30 minutes too long, Elizabethtown is the worst
movie of the year.
Slight
of the Hunter
Domino
Directed
by Tony Scott
In Tony Scott’s Domino, the tale of a pampered Hollywood
princess turned bounty hunter in the bowels of Los Angeles,
the first subtitle reads: “Based on a true story. Sort of.”
“Inspired
by” would’ve been more accurate. The inspiration is Domino
Harvey, the daughter of 1950s heartthrob actor Laurence Harvey.
According to Scott’s version, it’s not so much Harvey’s death
while Domino is a young girl that turns her into a borderline
sociopath, but the demise of her goldfish shortly after. When
the goldfish goes belly up, Domino (Kiera Knightley) decides
not to feel anything again. She becomes a bounty hunter so
she can do the nasty with lowlifes and kick ass legally. But
since this version of her life was written by Richard Kelly
(Donnie Darko), she will recover her humanity in an
overwrought and unbelievable manner that ignores the fact
that the real Domino died of a drug overdose earlier this
year.
Scott tells her story—make that his story—in the form of flashbacks
that occur as Domino is being interrogated by a tough FBI
agent (Lucy Liu). Domino is obviously in seriously deep shit,
and as she tells all, the depths of it are dredged in Scott’s
ultra-flashy fashion. The “huge clusterfuck” that she’s in
custody for is actually a double deal turned airborne-quadruple-axle
spin. Dismemberment is used as a pressure tactic, and at one
point, Tom Waits will show up and kiss Mickey Rourke. Rourke
plays Eddie, the legendary bounty hunter who is Domino’s mentor
and father figure, and he’s the most authentic and interesting
character in the movie. Knightley is feisty, as usual, but
lacks the brink-of-madness intensity that one would assume
drove the real Domino.
It’s her maniacally honed skill with nunchucks, knives and
assault rifles that convinces Eddie to take her on, even though
he already has a sidekick, Choco (Edgar Ramirez), an orphan
from South America who became pathological in the juvenile
justice system.
The unrequited sexual tension between Domino and Choco causes
friction in the already simmering trio. Then the bail bondsman
they work for (Delroy Lindo) assigns them to a shaky recovery
deal involving an armored vehicle with $10 million and four
thieves dressed as First Ladies. The heist will ensnare fraternity
delinquents, DMV clerks, mobsters, the FBI, two washed-up
Beverly Hills 90210 actors, and an Afghan explosives
expert, for no apparent reason. Despite Scott’s graphic-novel
stylization, in the form of subtitles and annoying dialogue
echoes (possibly a failed attempt to represent Domino’s overheated
brain), the movie is more recognizably in debt to Brit- American
hybrid crime capers and the falsely ballsy attitude toward
violence most associated with Oliver Stone.
This juiced-up mix is entertaining, at least for a while,
and some of the dialogue is blackly witty and observant. But
the human pathos that supposedly drives the action never gels.
How people get hardened, what it does to them, and the ways
in which they form alternative family groups for support is
the movie’s running theme, and eventually, it runs away with
Domino’s story. And the question that Domino asks herself
throughout—live or die?—is cheated in the end. The real-life
Domino’s drug addiction answered that one before she bagged
her first bail jumper.
—Ann
Morrow
A
Bad Fit
In
Her Shoes
Directed
by Curtis Hanson
Maggie (Cameron Diaz) is a sleazy, selfish party animal who
uses her sex appeal to obtain what she wants—like free drinks
in pricey restaurants. Her older sister, Rose (Toni Colette),
is a responsible, dowdy lawyer with a collection of sexy shoes
she never wears. After an extended, exploitive stay at Rose’s,
Maggie commits an unforgivable act of one-upmanship, and Rose
throws her out. Desperate, Maggie travels to a retirement
community in Florida to mooch off the grandmother she never
knew (Shirley MacLaine). While separated, the sisters grapple
with their respective dysfunctions and the exposure of the
family tragedy that no one talks about.
Yes, In Her Shoes is unabashedly a chick flick, drenched
in the sensibilities of both Oprah and Sex and the
City and directed by Curtis Hanson with a sure hand for
contrivance. But for its first half, the film rolls up its
sleeves and gets into the messier aspects of the sisters’
lives with humor and chutzpah. Diaz ably flaunts her attributes
to create a slyly repellent character, and Collette carries
the film with her more internal portrayal of a woman who allows
herself to be stepped on due to her insecurities. MacLaine,
of course, holds her own as the no-nonsense grandmother who
takes Maggie in hand with casual aplomb. But just as it seems
that Maggie will get what she deserves, the film slows into
a mushy trudge toward the predictable Happy Ending for all
concerned. Though In Her Shoes is almost redeemed by
its witty repartee, the final sequence requires a strong stomach
for schmaltz.
—Ann
Morrow
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