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.

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Cameron Crowe’s new offering Elizabethtown is described in the production notes as “a uniquely crafted comedy set in the key of life.” A better name for the movie would have been Crowe’s title for the soundtrack, “The Great American Radio Station,” because the music and the way it is woven around the performances of two of the female leads completely dominates—and distracts from—the story Crowe intended to tell.

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IN THE ARMS OF STRANGERS
Review by
DARREL MANSON

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I recently read that Jonathan Sachs, the chief rabbi of Great Britain has noted that the Hebrew Scriptures include one commandment to love one’s neighbor, but thirty-six commandments to love or care for strangers.

In Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, Drew, a young man fresh off a major failure, travels to Kentucky, where his father has suddenly died, to make arrangements to bring his remains home to Oregon. Along the way he is cared for and loved by a collection of strangers: his father’s extended family whom he doesn’t know, a stewardess who sees her life as helping others (but needs someone to help her was well), and even a wedding party at the hotel he’s staying at. Drew is very much an alien in a strange land when he arrives in Elizabethtown, but through the gifts of love shared with him by these people he doesn’t know, he gets a chance at a new life beyond his failure.

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