Jerry Maguire Goes to the Garden State

I decided to make this President's Day Weekend not only one in which I read a book about a president -- All the President's Men -- but also a three-movie three-day weekend. Sunday's movie was (as you read below) Night Watch, viewed in a theatre. On Friday night, I watched Lost Horizon on video (yes, the 1937 Frank Capra version, how could you even ask); and this evening, I watched Cameron Crowe's 2005 movie Elizabethtown on video.

Now, this movie was savaged by the critics, and pretty much ignored at the box office. Even though I love most of Crowe's movies (Singles landed with a thud, alas, and I didn't even try Vanilla Sky), I resisted going to see this one, because I would hate to see a terrible work by a writer-director I like.

So I was pleased that I liked Elizabethtown so much. It wasn't Almost Famous or or Say Anything or Jerry Maguire (but then, very little is), but it was funny, touching, and beautiful. Perhaps critics were put off that the Tom Cruise role was not being played by Tom Cruise (one of the producers of the film), but rather by Orlando Bloom, complete with a Tom Cruise-ish fake American accent. But contrary to the reviews, Bloom can indeed act without a sword or bow or other implement of death in his hand (although he does have a scene with a knife near the beginning). And they probably did not like a third act that some (like me) would find charmingly quirky, and others would find long, excessive, and self-indulgent.

As the title of this post implies, the plot resembles bits of JM (a high-flying executive must deal with a spectacular failure) and Zach Branff's Garden State (a depressed young man heads to a small town to bury a parent, and meets an eccentric young woman who helps him deal); but it takes enough twists and turns of its own to be more than the sum of those parts. Recommended.