Cameron Crowe rocks my world! (and it’s not a Crow(e) thing!)

Let’s just get it out there. I heart Cameron Crowe. Almost Famous? Loved it! Say Anything? Who couldn’t love Lloyd Dobler holding that totally 80s boom box above his head blaring Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”? I like Cameron Crowe, so I expect to like anything he puts out there. BUT (and here comes that big, broad but, as my high school history teacher used to say) I’d heard bad things about Elizabethtown. My friend Suzanne (from E-town) didn’t much like it. My buddy Janice said it was stupid, and she’d never watch it again. My friend Mindy said I’d like it.

So Mindy and I rented it on Friday, basically just to have something to do after we went out for Mexican food on Cinco de Mayo (yumm-O to Cozymel’s!) And I loved it. Yeah, it’s quirky. The characters are weird, and E-town’s residents are definitely overly caricatured. But the movie, as a whole, is about coming home, finding home, figuring out who you are away from your parents’ steady gaze. It’s about freedom; it’s about learning who you are as an adult and how to interact with everyone around you and their versions of you.

When Kirsten Dunst’s character, Claire, stopped to take her first “snapshot” of a memory she didn’t want to forget, I laughed a little, right out loud. While I’ve never held a pretend camera to my face and pushed the make believe shutter, I’ve been that girl. I’ve been in a moment, in the middle of a conversation, driving along a road on a sunny afternoon, lying in bed late on a Saturday night watching Ben Folds on “Austin City Limits” while it softly rained outside and known, deep in my soul, that this moment was perfect, and I couldn’t bear to ever forget it. “I can’t forget this,” I’ve said to myself, and closed my eyes in an attempt to sear the memory, the moment, the feeling of that perfection, in my brain. Like Claire, I’ve experienced moments that I just didn’t want to forget, and even today I can think back to the way it felt, the way it smelled, the song playing on the radio and remember that sweet bit of perfection.

Maybe I liked Elizabethtown because it’s about going home, something I’ve been thinking about lately and have even started journaling about, thinking that maybe one day I’ll cull it all into a book of some sort–you know, what it feels like to grow up and return to your childhood home, what it’s like to move away from home only to find your own place in the world, how who you were makes you who you are. Maybe I liked the movie because Cameron and I share a love for the same music. Any director/writer who includes a cover shot of Ryan Adam’s Love Is Hell and mentions Jeff Buckley’s “funeral bed” (the Mississippi River for the uninitiated), is all right with me. In the end, I like Elizabethtown because Drew, the lead character, realizes that the success he’s obsessed with and the idea of him he thinks everyone loves isn’t all there is to him. He’s not free to be the person Claire sees him as, but rather the person he can clearly see himself to be after she opens his eyes.