Elizabethtown@ WSC

Elizabethtown sees the divinely yummy Orlando Bloom finally pretending to be an American, starring against the wonderfully southern Kirsten Dunst in this most peculiar romantic comedy. A fellow audience member likened it to the Garden State – it has the same note of off-key peculiarity, even though I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Blooms mother tap-dancing at her husbands funeral to 'Moonriver' is perhaps one example, the paper eagle that flew accross the room on a pulley system catching fire also provides that off-key humour which prevented this film being dull. Bloom acquitted himself well as a shoe designer facing ruin, going to face an army of southern relatives to claim his fathers body for cremation. Dunst plays chirpy and slightly bizarre commitment phobe Claire Colburn, an air hostess who seems insistent on helping the young Drew Baylor from the moment she sees him on the phone.

Claire's quirky-ness begins to grate by the end of the film, and I began to wonder whether she was psychotic. Similarly, Drew Baylors tragic self pity had the potential to be annoying. In traditional holly-wood style, each helps the other past their neuroses, and the film ends with Bloom being led on a treasure hunt, at one end of which, Dunst has placed herself. Unusually, I did not invest in the relationship as I would have expected to – instead I was absorbed by the quirky details and outer story of the film.

Perhaps my biggest objection is that we never hear what was so terrible about Baylors shoe – it suugests lazy-ness on the part of the writers, and leaves one black mark on a pretty unsmirched copy-book.

Sweet, funny, and quirky – definatly worth seeing once!

: 20 Feb 2006 12:18 |  Tags: Movie Review |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem