Elizabethtown looks at life & death
Frances D’Emilio

VENICE (Italy)—Most of what happens in “Elizabethtown,” will probably never happen to you - but some could, and that is the hook in the Cameron Crowe film that debuted Sunday at the Venice Film Festival.
Starting with Elizabethtown, Ky., itself, a real place between Louisville, Ky., and Nashville, Tenn., the movie is packed with very real experiences: sudden death, career failure, girlfriends who ditch their men, men who ditch their girlfriends, people who realize after loved ones are gone that they never took the time to really know them.
“Elizabethtown” was being screened, out of competition, midway through the festival, which ends Sept. 10. The festival opened with directors - George Clooney, Ang Lee and Steven Soderbergh among them - taking pains to deny that their movies here were designed to deliver political statements.
Crowe, however, took the occasion to proclaim his movie’s message. “Elizabethtown” is about “the obsession with success and failure that we see in America,” the director told reporters. “But life comes along and trumps that in a big way.” In the film, Kirsten Dunst, playing Claire, a cheerful airline hostess, delivers the same message.