Elizabethtown (2005)

If I had to describe this movie in one word, that word would be: Bad. Fortunately, I don’t have to, so I can admit that there are some good parts. I can finally see what people like about Cameron Crowe, I think. The best way I can put it is that there’s something comfortable about his movies. You feel yourself just settling into them. With this one I did, anyway.

But I kept getting taken back out of it, in really jarring ways. Kirsten Dunst was fucking horrible in this movie, and I don’t blame her. That was one of the worst-written, most predictable roles ever. It was Hollywood’s version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. In every detail, right down to the way she leans in at just the right moment in that last scene (when he finds her at the Farmer’s Market). And the thing is, that role is really typical of the movie as a whole. It was just so unbearably predictable.

Except that with most predictable movies, at least you know what’s coming next. I know that sounds contradictory, but I mean it. This movie was basically a pastiche of really predictable characters and situations—very poorly executed, I might add—interspersed with these unbelievable digressions out into nowhere. The train really went off the rails at the wake. Everything about that was just, wow, just really shockingly bad. [I might add, as a bit of an aside, that Crowe’s characters are really unlikeable. Could they possibly be any more self-obsessed? And the more central the character, the worse they are.] OK: What. The Hell. Were all those people laughing and clapping for when Susan Sarandon was on stage? Was I hallucinating, or did she finish off with a tap-dance number (and then, of course, to truly sell the cliché, did she look at the huge picture of Mitch and mouth the words, “I love you”)? Was that a stand-up–comedy routine she was doing? I must have passed out at some point, because I missed the part where that was in any way relevant to the man they were all there to grieve.

I’m being serious, by the way—I think I passed out at some point. This movie was like a twelve-pound sledge to the frontal lobe. I can barely see straight. The only saving grace, I guess, was that after the wake the movie officially transcended into So-Bad-It’s-Good status. Or at least So-Bad-It’s-Hilarious.

Wow. Just wow wow wow. A lot of people took a lot of drugs to make this movie happen, obviously. And just as with any drug-induced fiasco, I don’t know whether to thank them for the laughs, or just try to move on with my life and pretend the whole sordid thing never even happened. I think I can feel myself starting to repress it, even now.