I won’t lie: I love Cameron Crowe. I love the way he writes. His characters say and do things which may be stylized, but are also somehow true. Crowe’s Jerry Maguire is one of the most liberally quoted movies of the last ten years. “You complete me”, “Show me the money!” and “You had me at ‘hello’” have become a part of the language. A weekend or so ago, I saw part of the writer/director’s 2000 offering Almost Famous on cable and I realized two things: 1) It’s a flawed picture, but it’s got some wonderful things in it and 2) I’d never gotten around to seeing Elizabethtown.

A few years back, I spent some time as a script reader — someone who reads screenplays for agents or executives who are too busy to read them themselves. I read Elizabethtown several months before it made it into theaters, and I thought it would mark a nice return to form after the unfortunate misstep which was Vanilla Sky. But then the movie itself came out and it didn’t exactly go over big. Reviews were mixed and business was tepid and, despite my admiration for Crowe, I kind of forgot about the flick. Some three years after the fact, I finally Netflixed it. So, what’s the verdict? Well, I’m of two minds.

First the bad news… The movie doesn’t work. Apart from the aforementioned “Sky”, it’s easily the least successful entry in Crowe’s catalog to date. They say that 90% of making a movie is getting the casting right, and that is, ultimately, where Elizabethtown falls flat on its face. Neither of the two leads are right for their respective roles. Orlando Bloom is stiff and uncomfortable (since he was no doubt fully consumed with the task of pretending to be American), and Kirsten Dunst is, well, just wrong. Worse, there’s very little in the way of chemistry between two people the movie would have us believe are falling in love. Unfortunate since half of Elizabethtown revolves around whether or not we’re willing to root for these two crazy kids. I for one was not.

What’s the good news? Like Crowe’s past films, there are moments which “pop”, which are memorable because of his insight and his unusual take on things. There’s nothing as great as John Cusack holding the radio over his head in Say Anything, or some of the more iconic moments in “Maguire”, but there are scenes that resonate. Which brings me to the other part of Elizabethtown which really worked for me personally: Bloom’s character loses his dad in the film and this was something which I was empathetic toward. All of the little moments related to this loss, the miniature flashbacks to time spent as a child with your father — it felt right and it was often quite moving.

But anyway, enough of that.

Remember how I said I read the script to Elizbethtown and liked it? Well, watching the movie was rather like hearing a recording of a good song done in the wrong key. The notes were right, but the end result was dissonant and frustratingly incomplete. Ah, well. I’ve got faith in Crowe. He’s a unique voice in movies and I have to believe he’s got a couple more good flicks left in him.