At the end of my comments on Garden State, I mentioned that Zach Braff might one day be as good as Cameron Crowe. I spoke too soon, because if Elizabethtown is any indicator, he already is. Surprisingly, Elizabethtown is a lot like Garden State, only not as good, in nearly every way.

Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) has just made a mistake in the design of a shoe that will cost the company nearly a billion dollars (how is that possible by the way, don’t they do extensive testing before hand?) Anyway, the point is, Drew is a failure and on the brink of suicide when he gets a phone call and is told his father has died. He and his family now live in Oregon, but his dad died while visiting his own family in the small, backwoods town of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Drew is sent to “retrieve” the body of his father because his mother (Susan Sarandon) and sister (Judy Greer) don’t want to have to deal with it.

So we have Drew getting to know his father’s family, all of whom believe he’s a great success, when deep inside he knows he’s not! He is uplifted, however, by his encounters with Claire (Kirsten Dunst), an airline attendant who’s just a little too spunky for her own good. In Garden State, Sam’s youth and innocence is genuinely refreshing and we really believe it has the power to help life Largeman out of his depression. Dunst’s character has a similar sort of innocent eccentricity, but it’s only a giggly innocence, not a real innocence. Both Drew and Claire are weaker, more worldy versions of their Garden State counterparts.

Characters aside, Elizabethtown also lacks the humor. A few moments flash, but it sinks more often than it swims. More often than not, it’s just messy. A chaotic, disastrous finale to the funeral services are an oddly appropriate end to the film itself. Elizabethtown, far from a steady narrative of any sort, is a grab bag of scenes set up to be alternately humorously touching and cute, rarely attains the feel it’s striving for. It’s trying to be Garden State, but always falling short.

If there’s one place you might expect Crowe to succeed, it’s in the music. Crowe has come to point where he considers his films music video’s of a sort and he’s ever searching for the right music for the right moment. I think he hits the spot for a number of scenes, particularly when Elton John’s “My Father’s Gun” comes in. But yet again, the music still falls short of the natural, affecting flow of Garden State. Part of the problem is that Crowe is trying to hard to get it in. The soundtrack is like flipping around on a radio station. It’s too much and too inconsistent. More importantly, I felt like some scenes were practically filmed for the music as opposed to the other way around, which is almost always a bad idea.

My rambling thoughts on Elizabethtown are fitting for the film. By the end, we’ve seen a bunch of scenes which may be alright in themselves, but just don’t work together with the rest of the film. Elizabethtown feels like it’s always trying to bigger than just Drew’s relationship with Claire, but I sense that it rarely is. In the end, we don’t have much more than a mildly amusing rom-com about two characters who really don’t need each other any more than we need another contemplative scene with a hip but folksy song playing in the background.

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