"A love letter to America"

In the production notes for his film Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe is quoted, “When I was a lot younger and writing for Rolling Stone, I’d be in a place like Arkansas or Oklahoma or Texas and fans would come up to me and say, ‘Why doesn’t your magazine write about people here?’� Now that he makes films, he has made a film that captures the people of America’s heartland.

Producer Paula Wagner says, “It seems really like almost a love letter to America.� It is the story of a man who has to go to Kentucky after his father died suddenly. There he meets the extended family that he’s really never known. The people of his family and the wider community of Elizabethtown are real people: people with faults, people who care, people who hurt, people with dreams (or who have lost dreams) -- people who live day by day.

It’s interesting that on the day I was taking part in interviews with actors and filmmakers, the New York Times published a piece by film critic A. O. Scott discussing the conservative slant of a couple of recent films. Certainly there are films with progressive biases as well. Film is a method of communication and is used by people with a variety of convictions to try to reach people with what they consider to be an important message. Scott’s article is a sign of the divisions that seem to be so prevalent in America. We are divided over the war in Iraq. We are divided into red and blue states. We are divided into pro-life or pro-choice camps.

Elizabethtown is a film that doesn’t fit into a red or blue vision of America – or perhaps it fits into both. It is designed to celebrate the America that isn’t busy thinking about being red or blue – but just being the kind of people we are. Orlando Bloom, who plays Drew, the film’s central character, says “It’s… the America that I think the whole world needs to see right now, this heartland of America….�

It’s not just the people that that are the focus of the film, but the land itself. Crowe was adamant about filming in Kentucky. He wanted to share the beauty of landscape and of towns that aren’t someplace in Pasadena that looks like Kentucky. In the production notes Wagner says, “Cameron’s screenplay is infused with the references to a specific place: it eloquently describes the bluegrass, the cicadas, and otherworldly heat.� The place almost becomes a character in the film.

Even more, the whole of America is a part of the film. An important part of the film is a road trip Drew takes with his father’s ashes after the memorial service. The trip takes him to a variety of places – important and unimportant. Bloom reflected on some of the places filming took him. “As a Brit, I felt privileged to go to these locations around America, whether it’s to stand in front of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis [site of Martin Luther King’s assassination] or to stand in front of the Survivor Tree in Oklahoma City or just to walk across a bridge in Arkansas that’s just the most amazing thing you’ve seen.

“…I’ve experienced New York, L.A., those big cities around the world, but I haven’t experienced the heartland of America, and that’s what’s portrayed in this movie, and that’s what’s so important.�

It’s worth noting that when filming was complete, Bloom chose to take a road trip from Nebraska back to L.A. accompanied by his dog and tunes that Crowe picked for him to enjoy along the way. He wanted to see even more of this country.

So if this is a “love letter to America� can it also be a universal story? Wagner says, “And really, when you think about it, isn’t there an Elizabethtown in every state and in every country? It actually kind of transcends America. Yes, it is very much an American love letter, but it also – when we screened it in Venice we got standing ovations…. People loved it. We had Italian and Spanish people coming up saying, ‘Oh, we identify with this movie so much….’�

Perhaps what starts out seeming like a love letter to America, is actually a love letter to the kind of life that is common in many places – the Elizabethtown that is our home. Wagner went on to say, “I think people are ready – let’s talk about this country – to have a film that gives them some love and embraces them and says ‘let’s talk about what’s human in all of us.’�