Review of Elizabethtown

I love Cameron Crowe. Let's make that absolutely clear. The casting of his movies is superb not to mention the writing or the sound tracks. Here, however, in Elizabethtown, the leading man is a hole on the screen. No charisma, no projection, no involvement. I'm not a teenage girl, I grant you that, but I don't think Cameron Crowe made this film for teenage girls. There was something about returning, about rediscovering and/or perhaps about first love. Elizabethtown aims higher than most teenage bound movies. The comatose performance of Orlando Bloom makes everyone else appear as if they were high on something. Billy Wilder is always a little bit present in Cameron Crowe's movies and Kirstin Dunst's character is a Wilder character if I ever saw one. I kept seeing the young Shirley MacLaine, or longing for, I should say. Dunst is an interesting actress but here she has to work with a wooden leading man, so that piece of miscasting throws the whole well intentioned enterprise way off course. Never mind, my love and admiration for Crowe will survive this one.