Entertainment

MOVIES: Nice-guy director endures derision by critics

11:34 AM CDT on Thursday, October 13, 2005

By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News

Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown tells the story of Drew, a young shoe designer (Orlando Bloom) who creates a disastrous new product and must endure the pitying looks of his co-workers. "I'm fine," he intones over and over, never with much conviction.

TOM FOX/DMN

Cameron Crowe's 135-minute Elizabethtown failed to impress critics.

Mr. Crowe can relate to his young hero after a 135-minute version of the film was met with critical derision at the Toronto International Film Festival last month.

"For a little while, people would walk up to me looking worried, asking: 'How are you doing? Are you OK?' " Mr. Crowe says during a post-Toronto stop in Dallas. "And I'd say, 'I'm fine.' I felt like Drew. Some of his performances of the words 'I'm fine' came directly out of my mouth."

Mr. Crowe cut Elizabethtown down to about two hours shortly after the festival; it plays better now, even if it's still not among his best work. But the raspberries were a new kind of flavor for the filmmaker.

A critical darling who also happens to be an ex-rock critic (as chronicled in the autobiographical Almost Famous), Mr. Crowe isn't accustomed to deflecting barbs from the Fourth Estate. But the press-screening crowds in Toronto were less than impressed with what they saw.

"The weird thing is that the public screenings were great," says Mr. Crowe. "I learned from them. But I was surprised at how different the worlds of the press screenings and the public screenings were. I've never had that before. The two worlds were more similar in the past. That just tells me the movie's playing more as a people's experience.

Mr. Crowe laughs.

"Not that critics aren't people."

Thanks, Cam.

Spend a little time with Mr. Crowe and it gets hard to criticize him. The reason? He's an extremely nice guy.

Walk into a room after meeting him once in your life and you're greeted with a warm "What's goin' on, man?" Sure, he knows how to play the press and ingratiate himself, but he never gives off the unmistakable odor of fakeness.

Spend a little time watching Mr. Crowe's movies and you realize he's a true-blue optimist. A Crowe character learns to keep his chin up no matter how hard he's knocked down. Hence Drew's never-in-doubt path to redemption, which arrives via the funeral of his father and the presence of a flight attendant-guardian angel (Kirsten Dunst).

"I do think he's an optimist," Ms. Dunst says of Mr. Crowe at the Toronto festival. "He's a glass-half-full kind of guy. But he has a melancholy side, too."

Mr. Crowe remembers casting his first film, 1989's Say Anything, in which John Cusack plays, appropriately enough, a melancholy optimist. Mr. Cusack was dead set against starring in a teen movie: "Why should I do this teen movie?" Mr. Crowe recalls the actor saying. "I don't want to be the feel-good guy. They're gonna call this movie 'Everybody Loves Lloyd!' "

Mr. Crowe took Mr. Cusack aside and tried to explain the soul of the character, Lloyd Dobler. "Lloyd's not all sweetness and light," Mr. Crowe explained then. "He's a warrior for optimism."

Mr. Cusack took the part, becoming the first in Mr. Crowe's lineup of optimism warriors – see Jerry Maguire and, now, Elizabethtown. Both Jerry and Drew share the ability to trudge ahead and even grow up in the face of adversity.

"Hopefully, I'm a clear-eyed optimist, as opposed to a Pollyanna," says Mr. Crowe. "It's a brutal world."

He recently came upon the following quote in an interview with Fellini: "All my movies are about the same thing: a heartless, cynical world in which a single angel attempts to flourish."

"That is what his movies are about," says Mr. Crowe, "but you can't always tell where he's hidden that in a story. I feel like I've written that story, too, because I believe the heroine or the hero is the one who hangs on and doesn't kill himself or herself and waits another day."

Another day. Or another edit.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com