My Annual Trip to Elizabethtown

Twenty years ago this October, I went to the closest movie theater chain to my university to see Cameron Crowe’s latest, a film about a man rediscovering his family through the loss of his father. The reviews weren’t great, but rarely has a negative review ever affected my interest in seeing a movie, so I bought a ticket and sat in a mostly empty auditorium to watch Elizabethtown. When I emerged two hours later, I was convinced I’d seen something great. Two decades on, my love and appreciation for the film haven’t diminished.

I was a big fan of Crowe when I went to see Elizabethtown. Less than two years prior, Vanilla Sky had given me a different perspective on life; both Say Anything… and Jerry Maguire were on relatively constant rotation in my movie watching, and I adored Singles and Almost Famous. I loved the films’ dialogue, the characters, and the ways the films were shot, edited, and scored. I mean, the music! The first decade and a half of Cameron Crowe’s career was filled with wonderful scores and soundtracks. I knew Elizabethtown would be no different. Frankly, I was primed and ready in 2005.

This is not to say I gave the film a pass when I first saw it. In all actuality, I went in with high expectations, something I try not to do, because that’s never fair to the movie or the people who made it. So, to say the film not only met my expectations but exceeded them is an understatement. Over the years, I’ve read a lot of negative criticism of Elizabethtown, because it’s something I tend to do when I love something that a vast majority of others do not. I look to see if I’m wrong or if there’s something wrong with me. I remain unconvinced and consider Elizabethtown to be Crowe’s best film, and I say that with some trepidation.

Not because I don’t believe the words I’m writing, far from it. I’m always worried about sharing an opinion like this, because it’s not simply about whether I like a movie. Elizabethtown means a lot to me because my thoughts and emotions are tied to it in such personal ways. I had nothing to do with the making of it, but I have to be honest about something. To do that, we first need to talk about what Elizabethtown is really about.

Blaming the marketing for the film would be silly. A studio has to sell a movie, so sometimes trailers will focus on one or two aspects of a film and amplify their importance. In this case, Elizabethtown appears to be about two things:

1) As stated earlier, Drew Baylor travels to the eponymous town of Elizabethtown after his father passes and rediscovers his family in the process, and

2) Drew meets Claire Colburn along the way and falls in love.

The film seems to be about family, as well as a love story. Is this wrong? No. But also very much yes.

Elizabethtown is actually about a man named Drew Baylor whose idea for a shoe ends up costing the company he works for nearly $1 billion. In the film’s opening sequence, we find Drew constantly telling people that he’s fine. He says it over and over again, but after losing his job, conducting an interview where he accepts full credit for what happened, and losing Ellen, his girlfriend, Drew attempts suicide.

Moments before he can do it, he receives a call from his sister. Their father has died, and he needs to go to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to retrieve his father’s remains, telling us in his voice-over that he will do what needs to be done and then get right back to where he was. I can see how some people could forget this, but Drew spends the entirety of the film knowing that when all of this is over, he’s going back home to kill himself. This was not something I took for granted when I first saw the film, and it’s only been amplified over the years.

I know what it’s like to go to dark places, as well as how difficult it can be to navigate the world with such dark thoughts running through one’s mind. Still, it’s doable. I can completely believe that Drew is able to bond with his relatives and fall in love, all while keeping his date with destiny. It isn’t until the much-criticized climax of the film, the road trip home, that Drew finally faces his mortality. It’s thanks to both Claire and his father.

This sequence is so masterful to me that I cannot wrap my mind around how this doesn’t work for audiences. To me, it’s the entire point of the film. Drew’s bonded with his father’s side of the family, his mother has made things right with them as well, and there has been a celebration over the life of Drew’s father, as well as a funeral. Claire, meanwhile, knows what Drew’s going home to do and makes him a massive road-trip playlist, complete with a map and scrapbook. Claire also knows Drew is taking the road trip with his father he never got to do, and she’s using it as an opportunity to save Drew’s life.

I like to consider Elizabethtown to be a spiritual remake of It’s a Wonderful Life. In both films, the protagonist finds himself in a dark place, ready to end his life, when someone from the sky intervenes at just the right moment. In the former film, it’s Claire, the flight attendant, who uses Drew to fight boredom during an overnight flight with so few passengers. It isn’t until the end of their conversation that Claire realizes Drew’s father has died. He isn’t simply a tired passenger. He’s sad, and she wants to make him feel better.

She turns up the bubbly personality as she sees him off, taking a photo of Drew walking away, a memento to remember the one night they had together. Claire doesn’t seem like she’s expecting to ever see him again or hear from him, even as she gives Drew her number if he needs help finding Elizabethtown, a town that seems very difficult to find if you’re not a local.

One night, Drew can’t seem to connect to anyone on the phone and ends up calling Claire. After talking with his sister and having one final conversation with Ellen, he finds himself talking to Claire all night. One imagines that he hasn’t had a conversation like the one he has with Claire in a long, long time, and again, it’s Drew who keeps things going. He wants to see Claire again. And this also looks like the end of things for these two, until Claire takes it upon herself to visit Drew.

They spend even more time together. He gets to see the real her, the one beneath all the charm and jokes. She gets to understand that Drew is clearly more than this sad man she met on a random flight. I get why they spend the night together, but I’m as hurt as Claire when Drew tells her the next morning that nothing has changed for him. He is still planning on killing himself. The road trip is Claire taking a shot to save this man she has fallen for, showing him why he needs to continue living life.

Then, we have Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life, and gosh, the name Clarence sounds a lot like Claire, doesn’t it? Both also have quirky personalities and big hearts, and both take it upon themselves to put their loved ones on a journey to save their lives. Clarence shows George Bailey a life where he was never born, and Claire shows Drew what he’d be losing if he took his own life. In the end, both choose life, and for me, in both films, the choice feels earned.

When Drew makes the decision to find Claire at the end, rather than complete the road trip home, I understand that he’s not using Claire as a lifeline. If that were the case, he wouldn’t have constantly kept her at arm’s length throughout the movie. No, Drew has come to understand that in life, we lose things like family and friends. Drew and his father had planned to take a road trip together, but Drew’s job kept him busy. Still, by the end of the film, he realizes that not everything has to stay lost. Bonding with his family was a big first step.

The road trip with the ashes of his father reminds Drew that even without taking his own life, he could die. Anyone can. His mother, his sister, his family in Elizabethtown, and even Claire. Drew straps the urn with her father’s remains to the passenger seat and speaks to his father from time to time. Occasionally, he makes stops and drops some of his father’s ashes. In a cathartic moment, Drew lets it all out. Though we don’t get to hear everything, we get the gamut of emotions, from seeing him thoughtful to seeing him laugh and cry. Without this road trip, he would not have gotten to spend such time with his father, and that’s all thanks to Claire.

Drew and Claire’s relationship is, of course, the love story part of the film, and it works for me. I’m rooting for these two by Elizabethtown’s end, because I know that if Drew didn’t believe he needed to take his own life, he would’ve stayed with Claire. And I sincerely believe that Claire begins their relationship by being there for a sad guy whose father has died, and as their relationship evolves, she’s more open to letting this sad guy in. Again, I feel her hurt when Drew tells her his plans for killing himself, his “very dark appointment with destiny,” hasn’t changed:

All I really want is to not be here.

It’s quite the moment, then, when Drew prepares to leave the “World’s Second Largest Farmer’s Market” at the end of the movie. You see it in his eyes. He’s thinking, “What the hell am I doing?” and he runs back in to find Claire. When he can’t at first, it’s a little heartbreaking to see him wondering if he’s blown it, but lo and behold, Claire is revealed. The final minutes of their reunion are pitch-perfect to me. Drew and Claire might very well lose one another, but that’s life.

Drew became so focused on his job that everything else became secondary. It makes sense that when he failed, he believed his life was over. Thanks to Claire, and in no small part to his father, Drew is able to reclaim his life. Suicide is not the answer for Drew. Life is. Even when it’s difficult and challenging, it’s worth it. We fail, we succeed, and we do everything in the middle. That is life.

Cameron Crowe did such a great job with this film. I will always prefer sincerity over irony, and Elizabethtown is about as sincere as it gets. It’s a beautiful, life-affirming film that I revisit every year. I dwell in Drew’s journey, Nancy Wilson’s score, John Toll’s cinematography, and that knockout soundtrack.

As for the cast, I think both Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst are excellent in their respective roles, bringing nuance to both the quieter and the bigger moments. I love that it’s so clear how Drew and Claire both want the other to see them in a certain way, only to slowly allow themselves to truly be seen as they are. I feel like we really get the real Drew and Claire in the film’s second half.

Susan Sarandon shines as Drew’s mother, and it’s always a delight to see Judy Greer in anything. The supporting cast is uniformly great in this film, and I could spend an inordinate amount of time on each actor, since they all help to bring this family and community to life. Of course, Elizabethtown is specifically about Drew Baylor most of all, so it makes sense that he not only gets the most screentime but also gets the biggest, clearest arc in the film. Would it have been nice to learn more about, say, Claire? Of course! Still, I get that Drew is the focus. And no, sorry, I know Claire inspired the whole “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” stock character, but she’s given far too much life in this movie for her to qualify. It’s honestly always confused me that Claire, of all female characters, inspired this.

I’m going to pretend that Elizabethtown is a perfect film, but it works for me. It did 20 years ago, and it does now. I love how so much of the film feels disjointed, as we casually and at times abruptly move from tragedy to slapstick comedy and back again. When sad things happen in life, funny things still happen. And sometimes when we laugh, we cry. Not everyone grieves the same way, whether it’s over the loss of a loved one or a reaction to a life wasted.

I recognize that we all see things differently. I’ve known this all my life, but I believe I’ve only come to understand it over the past decade or so. This is how we can all become the Drew at the beginning of the film. We can put ourselves in the center of our own universes, decrying one failure, regardless of its size, as apocalyptic. In truth, it really isn’t. It’s bad, sure, but far from the end of the world. I can’t imagine what it would be like to put so much of myself into something that results in failure and the loss of nearly $1 billion, but it’s my choice if I want to end my life over it.

It’s my choice to keep going. Even if I have family who loves me or a special someone who I’ve basically just met who’s in my corner, I can come close to finishing what I’ve started, or I can choose to embrace life and keep going. I take an annual trip to Elizabethtown every year because I find comfort there. This film means more to me than most so-called great movies, which I suppose makes it a great movie, at least to me. I can live through Drew, wallow in the darkness, and choose to run from that darkness and into the light.

Life is not easy for most of us, and that’s okay. We will lose those we love, and you know what? That’s okay, too. To choose to walk away from that is never the answer. Life will keep going after us, and wouldn’t it be nice if we chose to go along with it? I will always choose to be Drew, because the opposite, quite literally, is not the way to live.