'If It Wasn't This... It'd Be Something Else': Lessons from Elizabethtown.

This post serves as both a movie review and a general musing on a number of subjects spurred by extremely late night and sleep-deprived thinkings. Plural. The movie Elizabethtown is a really awesomely fantastic piece of cinema. It stars both Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom, and follows the story of Drew (Bloom) returning to his familial roots on the eve of his father's death and following a monumental professional failure on his part. Along the way he meets the quirky and unendingly optimistic Claire (Dunst) and he discovers the meaning of family, of connections, and most importantly the value of embracing and living life. Elizabethtown is a deeply flawed movie on many fronts, but it's a beautiful collision of imperfection that in and of itself is in fact perfect. Both Dunst and Bloom demonstrate a unique ability to completely miss the subtlety of their characters, yet somehow in those exact failures they create immensely entertaining people who, while in no way resembling real humans, serve as wonderful cyphers for bigger commentaries on the plot and life. I think it's the writing that goes a long way to salvage what I categorize as missteps in the lead performances. For instance, Drew is a decent guy who made a gigantic mistake and has screwy priorities. Orlando Bloom seems to lack the subtlety needed to portray externally a man who has been ruined professionally, has no real friends, and has recently lost a father whom he actually did care very much about. All of this is of course volleyed between his internal process and the shocks of being surrounded by a loving yet insane family (though 'loving' and 'insane' seem redundant when mentioning family). You never get the sense that Drew is experiencing any of this, yet you find yourself willingly filling in the blanks. Bloom succeeds in playing a man out of his comfort zone going with the punches for better or worse. Whether this is a result of Bloom having to ape an American accent (of which he ranks not the best but also not the worst -- see the Playstation 3 game Heavy Rain for the WORST American accents ever) or the fact that he's an Irishman in the American South is irrelevant. He's very likable, it works, and you relate. Kirsten Dunst on the other hand ends up making a character who seems like she should be at least mildly believable into the most cool, cute, and IMAGINARY figure in the movie. I think the main problem here is that Dunst plays Claire with absolutely no vulnerability -- something that in reality a person like Claire would be rife with. Still, you can't help but be drawn to her and find yourself smiling and wishing that a girl like that would come down from space on her unicorn (because she's imaginary) and set straight all of the issues in your life.

The most successful aspect of Elizabethtown is its overall tone. The film is dripping with the warmness of family and friends, the texture of the Southern States, the beautiful calamity of being lost in life and connecting with someone on a deep level, and the joy of being alive. Like almost every aspect of this movie, the tone succeeds despite itself. Elizabethtown begins as a bleak look into a man with nothing to lose's life. From here it feels like it does not know whether it intends to be dark comedy, slice-of-life storytelling, over-the-top pastiche, heartwarming, or revelatory. Despite this schizophrenia, the film again mashes into a wonderful canvas of emotion and confusion that while perhaps not narratively effective hearkens to a truly analogous version of how life can sometimes feel. This is all a fancy way of saying that I don't necessarily know why Elizabethtown resonates so resoundingly with me, but it certainly does. The movie is only helped by one of the most appropriate and effective soundtracks since Garden State. Seriously, go buy (download) it and take a drive somewhere. Beautiful.

The most charming thing Elizabethtown does is remain unendingly positive. It shows that even in the face of something as terrible as the death of a loved one, the ability to come together with the people you love and who love you is more powerful than any tragedy. And this is true both in life and this film. A family is a thing that surrounds you when you're hurt, and even though it can't necessarily heal you it allows you to be safe and deal with it all safe from the pressures of real life. It is paramount to what a family is in the first place that such safety can be found. A family is essentially a group of people who accept you on some level no matter what because you are part of them on a deeply personal (and sometimes biological) level. But just because some of the regular complications of human interaction are foregone does not mean that a family is any more personally together than anyone else. Instead it's a group of people bound together all of whom are trying their best to figure life out under the shared mandate of understanding each other. It's not always pretty and it doesn't always work, but the most rewarding thing to do sometimes is just bask in the chaos of it all and experience life together.

That's the last lesson to be gleaned from Elizabethtown; that being alive is easy, but that sometimes living is the hardest thing to do. This is why despite the fact that Claire seems oddly well-adjusted and above life's rigors, the viewer is drawn to someone who so fully and effortlessly rolls with the ebbs and flows of living. It may be that Claire represents how we'd all like to look at life -- as an experience full of sadness, joy, awkward moments, anger, and frustration; and that that's okay. People today get so caught up in the detours of life that we forget to stop and realize how much awesomeness there is all around us. On top of that, instead of ignoring our own inevitable mortality isn't it a lot more beneficial to embrace the fact that we only have a limited amount of time left to be alive? Though there is a looming sadness at the prospect that we are all going to die, the joy that can be extracted from every moment between now and then is magnified tenfold and we learn how to appreciate all of life's little subtleties all the more clearly. The solution is easy. Do what your heart feels, take a road trip and see the world, be reckless, make mistakes, apologize when you have to, face your fears, and never regret anything. Regrets in all of their hideous glory form parts of the tapestry of your life and while up close they serve not but to make you feel ashamed; like Elizabethtown is a movie, the moment you step back and take it all in as a chaotic but unified whole may just me the moment you remember what it's like to live and to have lived. Besides, if it wasn't this it would be something else.