The Chris Moeller Archives

The Kirsten Science Monitor

I caught a sneak preview Tuesday of Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown," a romantic comedy starring Kirsten Dunst, Orlando Bloom, and Bloom's American dialect coach. I went in thinking that two of Crowe's previous pop films, "Say Anything" and "Jerry Maguire," had worn out their welcome, but I enjoyed his autobiographical "Almost Famous," and one of his books, "Conversations with (Billy) Wilder," a definitive profile of my favorite director, sits on my shelf.
Cameron's turned up the emotional quotient on this latest release, which longtime observers might find hard to even imagine. The film cries, "Love me, love me, love me," and chances are your girlfriend will. Though it would have been more enjoyable for me if Crowe had dialed back the melodrama and the soundtrack by roughly half, and dialed up sharply the narrative focus.

Dunst is the most enjoyable part of "Elizabeth," as she is in almost every one of her projects. She's carefree, illuminant, and breathtakingly beautiful. And she's always surprising, which I consider to be the highest praise of all. (By comparison, her co-star is vapid and lacking the chops for comedy.) Critic Tom Carson wrote of Dunst in November 2001 that, "Even in her frothiest movies, she doesn't play airheads, she plays young women who don't know they have brains... She grasps each role so completely on its own terms that her behavior is utterly idiomatic; only later does it sink in how intuitively to the point her performance has been."

Watching her grow into herself during the time since that review appeared in Esquire has been one of the cinematic pleasures of the new millennium. It's hard to be optimistic that she'll find meaningful adult roles to play as she approaches her 24th birthday and the dismal fate of grown-up women in Hollywood, but Crowe's got his over-exposed heart in the right place as far as his leading lady is concerned. He adequately cuts her loose to explore a vivacious and rather eccentric young woman. She's safer in his hands than in Spiderman's.

posted by CM @ 11:38 PM