Elizabethtown is a romantic comedy centered around a death and a funeral. The movie opens on the worst day of Drew’s life. He is a shoe designer and his latest shoe design is a colossal failure that is going to cost his company almost $1 billion. He goes home, rigs up a suicide machine, and is ready to take his own life when his sister calls crying. Their father, who was visiting his hometown in Kentucky, has died of a heart attack. Drew’s suicide plans are put on hold as it is decided that he’ll go to Kentucky to have their father, Mitch, cremated and return with his ashes.
Drew picks up his father’s favorite blue suit from his mother’s home and heads to the airport. He is the only passenger on the plane and a very talkative flight attendant, Claire, sits next to him for most of the ride. She chats about anything and everything and gives him directions from the Louisville Airport to Elizabethtown. She stresses the need not to miss exit 60B. She follows him off the plane and gives him a coupon, which he later finds she’s written her numbers on.
Elizabethtown is a small town in Kentucky where it seems everyone knew his father. Drew goes to his aunt’s house, where he meets father’s family. Some of them he has met when he was a child, but others he has never encountered before. His father’s family has very definite ideas about Mitch’s funeral, as they intend for him to be buried in the plot his family has owned for over 200 years. Cremation is definitely not deemed acceptable for Mitch, a war hero and from what we can tell an all around good guy. While Drew is meeting the family in Kentucky, his mother is trying to outrun her grief by fixing the car, learning to cook, and tap dance.
One lonely night at the Brown Hotel, Drew calls Claire, and they talk all night, then agree to meet to watch the sunrise. They realize there is a definite connection, and Claire skips her trip to Hawaii to be there for Drew. Drew ends up having his father cremated and his mother and sister fly in from Oregon to attend the memorial service, and Mitch’s family buries his blue suit and medals in the family plot. Drew takes the road trip with his father that they had kept putting off and as he is following Claire’s meticulous instructions, he finds her waiting for him at the Second Biggest Flea Market in the country. And then there is happily ever after.
On the surface, this is just a fun rom com that happens to be centered around a funeral, but it is so much more than this from a human perspective. We start off with Drew wanting to die because of his colossal failure at work, but then a phone call from his mother and the need to be there for his family puts life into perspective, and he pulls himself together to be there for his family. This is something that many of us can relate to as death has a tendency to put things into perspective and helps us to realize that as long as we and our loved ones are still breathing there is hope that things will turn out okay.
Deaths and funerals have a tendency to bring together people from different aspects of people’s lives. The work people. The church people. The friends. The family. Elizabethtown did a nice job of illustrating how different people see different aspects of someone’s personality. Mitch’s Kentucky family knew him when he was a child and schoolboy. They shared stories of his growing up and interacting with his family. His Army buddies knew him as a hero. And his wife and children knew him as a beloved husband and father. His wife Hollie told about how they had met and how she knew his kin in Elizabeth town thought she had stolen him away.
Hollie’s grief was on full display at Mitch’s memorials, but unlike other depictions of grief where the widow would have been shown crying and inconsolable, Hollie was funny and honest. She talked about taking dance and cooking lessons as a way to avoid her grief. She talked about wanting to be brave and strong by fixing the car herself. And she spoke about the unmentionable when she mentioned a male friend who hugged her and suggested he could help with her grief while he got a boner. She had the audience in tears and in stitches and while they may have thought she stole their Mitch, in the end they embraced her as a grieving family member.
Funerals and memorial services run the gamut from the solemn and staid to rowdy Irish wakes to fisticuffs. And Mitch’s funeral was no exception. In addition to Hollie’s raucous tribute, Mitch’s nephew Jesse gets his band back together for a ripping rendition of Freebird complete with a paper bird on a wire that is meant to fly the length of the ballroom. Unfortunately, the bird gets lit on fire, and it’s flight through the ballroom brings flames and mayhem. Although most memorial services don’t end with a paper bird going down in flames, a lot do end in mayhem as people’s emotions are raw. After the mayhem of the memorial service, we cut to the cemetery, where we see how the cremation versus burial debate ends. Mitch has been cremated, but his family buries his suit in the family’s plot.
This movie was a wonderful, although at times overblown, depiction of what loss and grief is like in the real world. It is a mix of emotions that can range from tears to laughter over fun memories. There is no one way to grieve and we need to be generous in our grief. And in the end it is about love: love for the one who has left and love for one another.