Elizabethtown (2005)

Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown arrived in 2005 with a $45 million budget, a Venice premiere, and the distinct misfortune of being the film that gave Nathan Rabin the occasion to coin the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The plot concerns Drew Baylor, a shoe designer who costs his employer $972 million, contemplates ending his life, and is saved from that plan by a phone call about his father's death. He flies to Kentucky. He meets a flight attendant named Claire who talks at him for the length of a nearly empty 747. The rest is a funeral, an urn, and a road trip with customized mix CDs.

There is a faint whiff of corporate satire here. Mercury is a global sportswear concern, its executives are smug, and Drew's public shaming carries the queasy texture of real boardroom theater. But the film has no interest in following that thread anywhere uncomfortable. The corporation is a plot device, not a target. The rich are not eaten. A man simply feels bad about disappointing them.

The result is a long, moist meditation on grief, small towns, and the redemptive power of a woman who exists to fix a man's mood. Claire has no interior life worth the runtime; she has itineraries. The Kentucky relatives are white, the Oregon colleagues are white, and the film never once notices this, which is its own kind of innocence. There is no sermonizing to be found, no social instruction, no ideological project beyond the therapeutic. Crowe wants us to cry at a farmer's market in Nebraska. Some of us did. Most of us checked the time.