Why "Elizabethtown" is a Vastly Underrated Movie

This is just a fantastic piece of writing by Mrs. DuToit. She uses a movie ("Elizabethtown", starring Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom) to reflect on the commonality of our journeys as we make our way through the world, the people who help us along the way, the highs and lows we experience with the passage of time, the sometimes tough slog of discovering who we are, and how we become truly alive when we keep pushing through the hard times to make room for the things that make life worth living. I know a movie is just a movie, but still, the thinking and comparisons she displays here are quite good. It's a bit long, but reading the whole thing is definitely worth it.

"I started to answer the question in comments about why I thought "Elizabethtown" was a great film. I highlighted the text and started over again and again. What film can do, what it is supposed to do, when all the planets are aligned, when all the crafts are working in concert, is to move you. The vast majority of films made are stories, similar to stage plays. They don’t really use the medium (or even understand it). Television, despite the flicker tube, is an auditory medium. You listen more than you watch. It’s the nature of the relationship we have with the box.

Film is different.

When you go to a film, it is important to sit in the right spot. Well, it matters if it is the right kind of film. You need to sit in the middle of the aisle, close enough so that your peripheral vision touches the edges of the screen. You watch it as a horse with blinders, blind to the fact that you’re in a theater and that there is something else around you. If you sit too close you miss the edges. If you sit too far away, you miss the experience.

Allow the film to encompass you.

Most films go from A to B to C (ho hum, boring). They tell a story about something or someone. They stay in reality, even in fantasy or sci fi genres; meaning, that the images and plot are direct. There isn’t more to it. A film such as Silkwood, while a brutal story about people who experienced great drama, isn’t an art film. It isn’t trying to be. It’s just telling a story. Sometimes, as with that film, the filmmaker will do a few things that make it better than most, but it is still just a story film.

That isn’t what Elizabethtown was. It wasn’t a story film. The obvious story was irrelevant to the underlying story, and what it was trying to do.

I think that is why it would fall flat for many. They missed that it wasn’t trying to do what other films do. Its story was an allegory. All the images and characters were allegorical. It required a suspension of reality… a requirement to look deeper at what it was trying to do.

Before I get into the allegory of this film, I want to touch on another important point about art films: Great filmmakers often pay homage to other great films in their work. They design shots that are copies of other great works. They create scenes and characters in deference to other great ones. And if you don’t know film history, if you don’t know all the great films, then you won’t recognize those moments when they occur.

"Elizabethtown" was full of them.

The other thing that great art films do is revisit a common theme. As with all art forms, there are classic subjects that the great artists revisit—presenting to the world their interpretation of that theme. Painters, for example, have tackled the ascension, Bathsheba, the Virgin Mary, or Christ’s crucifixion. But other themes, not in the top 40s, have also been repeated again and again. Shakespeare brought new life to the Greek Plays. And sculptors have tried desperately to come close to the magnificence of the perfect man, as Michelangelo did with his David.

Michelangelo didn’t get it right only technically. When we look at his David we see more than flesh, bones, or muscle structure. We see the essence of the perfect man, a little bit narcissistic, but powerful, and beautiful. There is a sexual energy to the stone, and there is movement. We not only see the physical characteristics of David, we see into David’s soul.

I doubt that any other artist will be able to do it again, or even come close to that perfection. So new artists have to do it differently, which is why surrealism and impressionism came about. If you can’t get to the essence through realism, try surrealism.

And that was "Elizabethtown". A surrealistic look at who we are.

When Beethoven wrote more and more symphonies, other composers began committing suicide. Others gave up composing.

Those composers realized that Beethoven had done it. The it that artists are always trying to achieve… the rare offering of absolute perfection. No one can describe what that perfection is ahead of time, but when you see it or hear it, you know it. Only when someone has achieved it do you realize what it is, and in seeing it, you know it to be it. When you see it or hear it there is a sense of “ahhhh, yes, that is it.” And you are forever changed by the experience.

That is what the true artist attempts to do. To have that “ahh” achievement. When someone else accomplishes it so perfectly it is pointless to continue that same pursuit. It has been done. It is time to move on to some other subject because that, whatever that is, has been done, or you have to try it a different way--with a new and different approach. Da Vinci captured the essence of woman in the Mona Lisa. It has been done. Winged Victory captures the essence of spirit. That has been done. Venus de Milo captures the essence of femininity. That has been done.

Just as philosophers are in a constant search for the ultimate truth, the thought or ideal that will explain all and unfold the mysteries of the universe as if you’ve found the combination to the lock, artists are after that same truth, but in the form of art. It isn’t common in the ordinary sense. So when we refer to things as common themes, we don’t mean it in the sense of the great masses, or in the sense of ordinary. Common denotes frequent. There are frequent themes that artists attempt to interpret, to give their spin and take on it, and to understand them.

We revisit these themes to understand the way that others have approached them, just as a philosopher studies the works of other philosophies. They are looking for the hole, the secret, or where the philosopher got it wrong. Always, we are looking for an explanation. We read, look, or listen and copy so that we might understand them, and in doing so, understand ourselves. These are intangible, complicated things, or we would have long ago unlocked their secrets and come to understand them.

Artists copy.

That is the first thing you have to know about art. It is all about copying. Copying what came before. There is an important lesson in that, far beyond the study of art from the perspective of light, shade, and perspective. We don’t want to start over. We want to start from a higher plain, from the foundation left behind for us. It is the same reason we study our history, so we know where we have been, so we don’t have to do it all again, but might go beyond where we’ve been, to something greater and closer to perfect. But you can’t get there if you start from scratch. You have to begin where it stopped and you have to copy that last one so you know where you are. You have to start where we left off.

So where did we leave off? Something about allegories…

The opening scene of "Elizabethtown" was a flight, a journey. The first clue of the allegory/subject matter of the film was in those opening shots. We saw the reflection, but from where we’d come from, not where we were going. Ah! A film about reflection… of looking back. Orpheus!

What was the moral of the Orpheus story? Looking back is dangerous. You can’t go back. It will turn you to stone. You can’t live in the past. You can only look to the future. Future is life. The past is death. Being stuck in the past is the end of life, ie, turning to stone. You must go on.

It was a film of journeys. Dozens of them. Some people were able to make the trips, others were unable to leave or move at all. Some were stuck where they were, in a kind of purgatory. Some had escaped. Some never would.

The Orlando Bloom character ascended and then descended into Hell (the symbolism of the corporate world in which he’d spent the last 8 years of his life). Alec Baldwin was the symbol of the devil (fitting, being Alec Baldwin). He was consummate evil. He had wooed the man from his father, and then when he was through with him, he cast him out. And the man was empty. He was discouraged. All that he had done and sacrificed was for naught.

The story twisted to allow us to go back, but not to the lead character’s past, to his father’s past. It was a journey of discovering who he was, and his roots. But nothing about those scenes were to be taken literally. They were all about being in the belly of his family, and that was the symbolism of "Elizabethtown". There was something wholesome about the place—like a great big glass of cold milk and cookies. There was warmth in the people, although they were surreal and peculiar. But even with that, all of the characters (however bizarre and goofy) were the essence of warmth, of caring, and of family.

The half-smirk of the Bloom character told all of that, of how he was living the moment, but in a constant state of disguised laughter at the simplicity of the place and the lunacy of the people, complexity in simplicity. Their rawness of emotion and goofiness kept him surprised and off guard. They come up with silly solutions for ridiculous problems, all the while Bloom was trying to cope, but only going through the motions. It is the way that someone floats through life when they are in a state of great shock. Everything becomes surreal and you’re moving around in the world as if walking through a bowl of Jello.

He had an appointment with death...the death he had decided to welcome after his fall from grace.

But she was there. His spirit guide. His savior. His flight attendant. He was going to be alone in this journey; although she would guide him and direct him, and there would be crowds around him… it was a journey he had to take on his own.

Then she gave him a map. A map and a plan that would allow him to choose a path, but before he could choose a path of his own, he had to follow the one she had given him. He might not have made the discoveries she laid out for him to find. It might not have worked. But he went with it. He followed it exactly, doing what she had instructed him to do.

The ascension.

The film turns to a series of montages at this point and becomes entirely something else. Quick cuts, short scenes, each one a jewel. We had learned just enough about the character and his sins and passions to know who he was, and how he came to be where he was. And he knew who he was. Now it was time to figure out what he could be, what was possible, and if he would keep his appointment with death or choose another road.

The quest begins. The search for truth, for forgiveness...a journey of discovery and redemption.

In all the other significant trips he took in the film, his method of travel was flight (in an airplane or a helicopter). This time he was grounded. His body was grounded to the earth, but it was time for his soul, his essence to take flight… setting aside one’s worldly goods…

He ascended into the glory of America. He left his father’s bosom and past and went on a journey in search of himself, in the raw beauty and liberty of America. He floated, soared, and relished in the bounty and vastness of it, in the strangeness and peculiarity of it. He stopped to smell the roses. He stopped to dance. He drove to cry. He carried on to remember, but to let go. He saw beauty. He saw ugliness. He heard America talking, because (for the first time) he listened with an open heart and a rawness of spirit. He had nothing to lose. He rose from the ashes of failure and despair, of guilt and longing—of the impostors of fortune. He was in search of something and he found his father’s grace and soul, and in doing so, found out who he was. He made peace with the past and released it—was released from the Hell he had made for himself. He found the present, and had nothing but the future to revel in. In getting there, there was room in his heart for her.

And he was redeemed, restored, and made whole again. This Orpheus didn’t look back and was able to steal Eurydice back to earth. This Romeo awoke before Juliet took her life.

It is a theme as old as art itself. The ultimate theme, you might say. A fable told since man first expressed thought, told in a thousand parables—a journey of seeking one’s fortune, an awakening of spirit, and of discovering what fortune means.

Magic!

Two road diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."