The Collegian

Issue date: 10/21/05 Section: No Limits

Drew Balyor (Orlando Bloom) takes a breather from his "road trip" with his deceased father that Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst) planned out down to the music to play.

In "Elizabethtown," Orlando Bloom plays the odd Drew Baylor, whose career as an athletic shoe designer is suddenly going downhill. Drew was putting all his time and energy into his work for eight years, and was on top of the world, before he discovered his shoe design had bombed and cost Mercury Worldwide Shoes $972 million, which his boss Phil, (Alec Baldwin) irritably explains may as well be a billion.

There was no real explanation as to why the failing shoe design cost the company so much, but stresses Drew to be to the point where he no longer wants to live.

Drew contemplats an idiotic way to commit suicide by attaching a knife to his exercise bike, so that when he starts to ride it, the arms would swing and stab him.

This is when he gets the call from his younger sister (Judy Greer) that their father, Mitchell, has died from a heart attack while he was on a family visit in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

Kristen Dunst plays the almost mystical; fairy-like Claire, the flight attendant on Drew's flight to Kentucky, where he is the only passenger. Claire pretty much forces him to listen to her talk and answer questions about his personal life and the reasons for his trip to Kentucky.

They somehow exchange phone numbers and once he gets to Kentucky, she is there for him to talk to at a time when everyone else in his life who should be there, isn't. In Kentucky Drew meets family members and sees how loved his father really was. Drew never really mourns or shows any real grief over his father's death. It was not really clear why he and his immediate family were at first handling his father's death so oddly and nonchalantly.

Between trying to get over his failing shoe designing career and deciding whether or not to cremate his father, or put him in the family plot that everyone in Kentucky seems to want Mitchell to be buried in, he realizes Claire is the only one who is truly there for him.

They first spend long late nights on their cell phones, talking about what seems to be nothing at all. Claire then begins to pop up unexpectedly throughout the film, and although it's almost creepy, she is always there when he needs her.

Continued...

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