Sadly this
is not a total aberration. It has been four years since Crowe brought us We Bought a Zoo, the tale of one man’s inconceivably
ill advised plan to purchase a house with a zoo in the backyard in the wake of
his wife’s death. While the film made $120 million, on a budget of $50 million,
it is hard to argue that it is anything other than risible. At best it is an
argument in favor of the old adage that you shouldn’t make a major purchase for
at least a year after a major life change (getting sober, losing a spouse,
etc.), and at worst it is precisely the kind of schlocky pap that makes people
fear for the future of films that feature characters not spawned from the pages
of Marvel or D.C.
Before that
it was Elizabethtown a stumbling slog
through the story of an unlikeable man’s attempt to find love with Kirsten
Dunst in the wake of a personal tragedy. The film does feature Lynyrd Skynyrd’s
“Freebird,” but even that is ruined, after the fact, by that song’s glorious
handling in Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsmen:
the Secret Service (a film that is quietly running hand in hand with Rush and Guardians of the Galaxy as the most entertaining film of the last
five years).
Now, there
is no denying that Crowe has had some success: Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a classic, Say Anything taught an entire generation of young men that their
woo-ing practices should include Lloyd Dobler trenchcoats and standing like a
total creep outside of a young woman’s window, Jerry Macquire was nominated for Best Picture, and Almost Famous has become an unlikely
cult phenomenon among a certain group of people who admire the idea of Lester Bangs (played in the film
by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) without ever having to deal with a man who
was a notorious pain in the ass.
Under normal
circumstances, I would say that this mixture of swings and misses and solid
extra base hits in a writer/director’s filmography are merely evidence of
psychologist Dean Simonton’s claim that “quality is a probabilistic function of
quantity,” or, that anyone who makes enough movies will make some quality
pictures and some total stinkers. But that seems too trite to simple and
explanation for Crowe’s career arc. His earliest films are, uniformly, his
best, and what one sees in the later films is, as Roger Ebert lamented in his
review of Zoo, “too much formula and
not enough human interest.” Viewed through this lens, Crowe’s entire
filmography looks a bit different. His films are nearly without exception the
stories of men who either voluntarily or through the machinations of fate are forced
to make and then confront significant life changes whose ultimate triumph comes
in the form of new self-discovery. Done well, as it was in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants or Nat Faxon’s The Way, Way Back (both written by the
inimitable Jim Rash), such a structure can offer poignant or even profound
moments of human revelation. But it is also possible to rely too heavily on the
structure, and allow the emphasis to slip from the development of
characterization. This seems to be Crowe’s problem. Rather than expressing a
statistical truism, his career seems to more precisely mirror that of a pitcher
whose arm has just lost its pop. The mechanics are all the same, but an arm
that used to be live and capable can no longer accelerate through its motion.
The result for both pitcher and filmmaker is the same. A potentially career
threatening streak of ducks.
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