Delayed Reaction: Elizabethtown

The Pitch: Cameron Crowe brings his talents to the country.

After failing in business in spectacular fashion, a man must return to Kentucky to pick up his dead father.

Elizabethtown has a special kind of infamy. The first reason for the infamy is local. I live in Louisville. Not many movies are shot in the Louisville area. People still bring up parts of Stripes being shot here. Tammy takes place in Louisville, but it's clear to anyone from Louisville that none of it was shot there. The last big movie I remember being filmed in Louisville was Elizabethtown - 13 years ago. C'mon, Kentucky. Let's give some tax breaks. When the movie came out, I felt required to watch it, just for the fun of recognizing locations. It's a feeling people from hubs like Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, or Atlanta can't appreciate as much. In fact, my motivation to rewatch Elizabethtown was that I'd just watched Science Fair, which also partly took place in Louisville (and I couldn't remember why I didn't like the movie). Ultimately, I came away disappointed by the representation of the characters in the movie, but I also distanced myself by pointing out that Elizabethtown (the city) is not Louisville. So, how dare they make people from around here look that bad, but, they aren't really from this area anyway.

The other, larger infamy with Elizabethtown is that Nathan Rabin's review of the movie created the term "manic pixie dream girl" (MPDG, for short). I kind of hate the term, partly because I can't stop myself from using it. It's an irresistible combination of words. I get why it took hold. In case you don't know the term, MPDG refers to female characters in movies that exist with no backstory and are only there to bring wonder and whimsy into the male protagonist's life. It's a very smart observation. What annoys me about it is that people really lost track of why the term was created. MPDG is a knock on the writing, not the performance or the actress. Instead of using the term to criticize a filmmaker, people weaponized it against the actress. Let me use everyone's favorite MPDG punching bag to explain what I mean:

• Zooey Deschanel, the person, is not a MPDG.
• Zooey Deschanel in the movie Yes, Man, is playing a MPDG, but that alone doesn't mean she's bad in the movie. It only means the character is written poorly.
• Zooey Deschanel's character in (500) Days of Summer is not a MPDG. Joseph Gordon Lovett's interpretation of her often is a MPDG, but that's not quite the same. The whole movie is about the perception of a relationship. It's specifically meant to play on the MPDG trope.

That is the reason why I can hold the following two opinions: 1) I agree with all the criticism thrown at Elizabethtown about how Kirsten Dunst is the prototypical MPDG. 2) I think Dunst is charming and likable and injects life into a dull movie. She's the main part of the movie that worked for me. Orlando Bloom on his own is a drip. I never felt much of anything for him, and only part of that was because his American accent felt really unnatural. I think Crowe tries to round out the family members in Elizabethtown, but they start a little too stereotypical to recover from. Judy Greer, as Bloom's sister, exists only for grimaces and eye rolls. Susan Sarandon, as Bloom's mother, gets a good speech that was supposed to be a great speech when Crowe first imagined it. Frankly, every time Kirsten Dunst showed up on screen, I wanted to follow her and leave the rest of the movie behind. I wanted her to be more than this mystery girl who is immediately smitten with Orlando Bloom's mopey failed businessman.

I'm curious what Cameron Crowe's response to the MPDG claims are. I'm sure I could find an interview, but I'm lazy. Dunst isn't his first MPDG. A lot of people consider Kate Hudson's Penny Lane in Almost Famous to be a MPDG. I don't know that I agree with that, even if my reason is a cop out. Penny Lane cultivates her own mystery. She designs herself to be something close to a MPDG. If that's intentional, can she really be a MPDG? Besides, we do know what's going on in her head some of the time. If the rest of the movie around Dunst was better - if Bloom wasn't so deflated throughout, if the editing wasn't so scattered - would the MPDG label bother me less when applied to Elizabethtown? Probably not. Her character probably unfairly became an example of a trend. It's kind of like how one police shooting may not be any better or worse than another, but one ends up being the straw that broke the camel's back. The movie is bad enough to deserve it's awful legacy. The performance isn't.

So, the moral of this story is, when it comes to MPDGs, yell at the filmmakers, not the actresses (or actors in the case of the Manic Pixie Dream Boy). Also, more things should film in Louisville.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend