Leslie Felperin

Returning to his romantic comedy roots after Vanilla Sky, helmer Cameron Crowe throws a friendly party with Elizabethtown, laying on colorful characters, witty banter and a constant stream of vintage tunes. However, bash lasts too long, and guests try too hard to have fun, and pic's busy, neo-screwball script -- about a shoe designer planning his father's funeral in a Kentucky town while falling for a perky stewardess met en route -- suffers from arch editing and a surfeit of whimsical subplots. Modest B. O. looks likely.

Although presumably in development for some time, basic set-up sounds like a sunnier, studio version of Zach Braff's indie hit Garden State, which beat Elizabethtown to the punch by a year and a half. State was a similar tale of a depressed young man who travels back East for a parent's funeral and ends up finding love with a gorgeous, hip chick. But where Braff's pic was riddled with slacker angst and featured characters with jagged edges, nearly everyone in Elizabethtown is as gosh-darn nice as a warm sunny day.

The only real exceptions are a couple of meanies at the West Coast corporate headquarters of footwear company Mercury, where workaholic protagonist Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) is introduced. ... read more

Claudia Puig

According to Elizabethtown, there's a world of difference between fiasco and failure.

"Failure is simply the non-presence of success," says Orlando Bloom, as shoe designer Drew Baylor, in a voice-over. "But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. "

After drawing that distinction, Drew, who has fashioned a debacle of an athletic shoe, scuttles through the offices of the footwear giant he works for, avoiding the sad stares of his colleagues. "I'm fine," he insists.

Sadly, Elizabethtown, written and directed by the talented Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire), is not fine at all.

Though it's no fiasco - there's nothing mythic about its disjointed story - it is a failure.

The first 20 minutes of the film show such promise that the movie's subsequent unraveling feels all the more disappointing. ... read more

Carina Chocano

What's the difference between a failure and a fiasco. That's the first question Orlando Bloom's character, Drew Baylor, asks himself in Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, and the question he keeps asking throughout. It also echoes some of the critical response that followed the movie's premiere at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, making it seem uncannily prescient and self-aware.

In Toronto, Elizabethtown was introduced with a disclaimer, and Crowe has since trimmed it by about 15 minutes. But I doubt the edit will change the minds of anyone who didn't like it the first time around. The new version remains, in many ways, a mess of a movie . but a warm, friendly mess that's hard not to like, even when it tests your patience.

Despite his own success, Crowe seems unusually drawn to big-scale failure both as a subject and a mind-altering experience. ... read more