Despite having both critical and commercial success over the course of a few decades, Cameron Crowe remains one of the more polarizing filmmakers working today, specifically because he seems to lack a certain panache that makes him interesting. He had radical successes with Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, so much that he was essentially given a blank cheque for the rest of his career, being allowed the freedom to make any film he felt impelled to, with the expectation being that it would be just as successful. Unfortunately, the results were far less ideal and remain divisive to the point where we have to wonder whether Crowe’s acclaim was actually earned. There’s a portion of the population that stands by Vanilla Sky, his peculiar adaptation of the Spanish masterpiece Abre los ojos, which is somewhat understandable, since it goes have a lot of raw ambition. This is not the case for the subsequent film, the misguided Elizabethtown, which sees the director telling a story of a young, depressed man returning to his family’s hometown in working-class Kentucky to retrieve the body of his recently-deceased father, which is based on Crowe’s own experiences having to go to a similar part of the country for the same purpose. Normally, we’d expect such personal stories to be filled with candour and charm, especially when presented as a comedy (nothing highlights the experience of mourning than being able to find joy in these sad moments), but Crowe somehow manages to not only make the most hackneyed of comedies, but to do so in a way that feels blatantly offensive to the audience’s intelligence, since it fools us into thinking that any self-respecting human would act like these people. It’s a dismal failure of a film, and one that is even impossible to appreciate for its impoverished narrative, which could have at least been enough to entertain us through unintentional humour.

Something that often happens with comedies that are either commercial failures or poorly received by critics is that they will eventually find themselves being re-evaluated, and hopefully earning some acclaim in later years. The idea of comedy being subjective is certainly relevant in these cases, as is the belief that sometimes works of art aren’t immediately accessible to those who would likely appreciate them. Nearly two decades later, Elizabethtown remains just as bad a film as it was when it was released, despite other similar films undergoing further analyses, and either being proclaimed as hidden masterpieces, or cult classics at the very least. Absolutely nothing Crowe does her is all that impressive – and if anything, he seems to be actively regressing away from the mounds of potential that inspired previous works. One would expect there to be some kind of potential hidden beneath the layers of heavy-handed emotion, but alas there is very little promise even at the most fundamental level. The emotions are so overwrought, that we struggle to connect with any of these characters, because they are portrayed as nothing more than flaccid, unconvincing stereotypes. There was initially an attempt to read more meaning into the film, such as looking at it as an allegory for a lost soul’s journey through Hell – the very fact that this theory came about proves how desperately critics and theorists wanted to find some meaning beneath this film, since it would be unnerving if such a deeply mediocre story just existed as it was presented to us. It’s actually far more entertaining to imagine how a better director could have been able to handle this material (since it does have an intriguing concept, just one that is compressed under layers of poor directorial decisions), and any work that makes the viewer feel like they could tell the story better is immediately cause for some concern.

One would be inclined to think that, even if a director with such resources at his disposal could not scrounge together a good story, he’d at least be able to assemble a decent cast and give them some interesting characters. Unfortunately, much like everything else in the film, Elizabethtown is woefully ill-equipped at even the most basic details when it comes to its characterization. The film is led by Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, both excellent actors at the peak of their stardom, and the rare kind of performers who occur at the perfect intersection between blockbusters and more intimate fare. Despite their proven talents, neither one of them even approaches decency here – its extremely possible that they’re giving career-worst performances in Elizabethtown, which is not wholly a slight on them as actors, but rather on the fact that they were given these limp, lifeless characters without even a hint of complexity. When the aspect of an actor’s performance that we remember the most afterwards is how their accents were ridiculously poor, then there is certainly something inherently wrong at the root, especially for a film as character-based as this one. The supporting cast doesn’t fare any better. The iconic Susan Sarandon is used poorly, acting as the deranged comedic relief for the majority of the film, before being shoehorned into the final act in an attempt to bring even more misplaced emotion into a film that certainly does not lack excess, and Judy Greer does absolutely nothing outside of speak on the phone between sobbing sessions. Absolutely no one in this film is used well, which is unfortunate considering the cavalcade of wonderful character actors that show up at various parts of the film. It’s a deeply flawed film in every way, and the actors aren’t able to do much to salvage what little potential could be found in this unfortunately convoluted mess of a film.

Ultimately, what makes Elizabethtown such a failure is how misguided it is in a lot of its perspectives, offering something that it knows it can’t accomplish, and covering it up with layers of the dourest and ill-advised emotion imaginable. This all comes down to the fact that Crowe is far too sentimental a filmmaker to be telling these stories, especially since many of his films are drawn from his own experiences. He struck gold with Almost Famous because he took his experiences as a young music journalist and reconfigured it into a touching coming-of-age story. Unfortunately, the attempt to replicate this through telling a story about coming to terms with his father’s death was far less successful. It’s a classic case of a film not knowing how to function as intended, nor possessing anything close to the required charm that would make these offbeat moments of emotion feel necessary. Tonally, the film is beyond salvation – it is a romantic comedy that is about as sexless and limp as it can be, and a story about family that seems to genuinely hate every one of its characters. It doesn’t even work as a story about a young man finding himself through returning to his roots and finding that life is worth living. Considering the flippant references to his depression and constant desire to kill himself (one of the more despicable attempts to capitalize on the morbid brilliance of Harold and Maude), one would think the film would at least contain some degree of complexity in exploring the protagonist’s psychological state. Elizabethtown is an example of a film that aims for every conceivable genre, but somehow misses on each one of them, resulting in an experience that is genuinely quite unpleasant.

To call Elizabethtown laughable is to imply that anything about this droll and lifeless endeavour solicited even the slightest chuckle. Crowe commits so many cardinal sins of storytelling with this film – he not only writes a screenplay that is filled to the brim with every imaginable cliche, but he does it in such a way that we can’t even focus on the story, because the film itself is so dreadfully boring, our attention is consistently diverted away from the screen. Absolutely nothing about Elizabethtown warrants even an iota of deeper thinking, which is unfortunate considering Crowe did show some aptitude as a director with something of a vision previously – but ultimately, he was someone who allowed a couple of successful films dictate his subsequent career, and it’s not surprising that his work has been steadily declining ever since he was at his brief peak, as evident by the rapid downhill signalled by this film, which seemed to be the beginning of the end for the director. Considering Elizabethtown begins and ends with voice-over narration discussing the nature of failure in relation to the concept of a fiasco, it seems fitting that the final product would be an unmitigated disaster, a deeply inadequate and honestly quite useless attempt at romantic comedy, made by someone whose flirtations with success ended up being his biggest hindrance, since not only did he regress in terms of ambition, but lost the very spark that made him a genuinely interesting filmmaker in the first place. It’s unfortunate, but considering how he has only found himself increasingly exiled from conversations on promising directors of the past few decades, it seems like this lack of audacity and refusal to grow as an artist (at least in terms of being a narrative filmmaker) has finally caught up with him, the signs being very clear in this unfortunate bundle of ideas masquerading as a film.