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| n the first of a two part series, Jason Chamberlain takes a look at Drew Baylor`s journey home in Elizabethtown! Welcome to the new issue of Casting Call everybody. I hope I left an impression on some of you with last week's column; my main message was (and is) that our own story is the one that truly matters, and we should spend every day and every moment we have improving that story in any way we want and need to. This week I will dive back into the realm of those fictional characters that inspire our nonfiction lives. And in continuing the theme, I want to talk about a character who was lost in his life, only to find himself again. A character who brought himself to the brink of death, but was pulled back by the power of love (sappy I know). He's the central character of the movie Elizabethtown, which I recommended last week, and if you still haven't seen it, I hope today's column will convince you to give it a rent. With my column, I sometimes fall into the trap of summarizing a character's journey too much. You can rent the movie for that information, and what I'd really like to try and do (and what my goal for every column is) is look past the surface and see the character's motivations, their struggles, and how we can relate to them. As is the case with most movies, you can watch Elizabethtown and simply be entertained by a good story. Or you can watch it a little more carefully, and find meanings and lessons that are applicable in your own life. That's what I'll try to do today! Presenting Drew Baylor (as played by Orlando Bloom) in Elizabethtown. We all know people who are obsessed with their work. Workaholics. People who are always thinking about work, staying late, giving up holidays so they can continue to focus on it. Some people find their only meaning and purpose in life through their profession. While certainly, some professions are definitely rewarding, no matter how fulfilling our job is, it should not be all of our lives. We must always make room for recreation, for our hobbies, and most importantly for our friends and families. Life is too short to do otherwise! Sadly, Drew Baylor learns this lesson in a tragic way. He is a young up and coming shoe designer at one of the biggest shoe companies in the world, and he has been working for eight years on the design of a revolutionary new sneaker. After years of hard work, his creation, the Spasmotica, has garnered incredible buzz and anticipation and it is soon to be unleashed upon the world. In his search for greatness, Drew has neglected his family, missing out on birthdays and holidays, and on what become his father's final years. His work is his life. When the Spasmotica is released, it is beyond a failure. It's a fiasco. The shoe is wholly maligned and rejected by the public, forcing mass recalls of the product. Mercury Shoes is in ruins, having lost a billion dollars. And Drew is responsible. Naturally, he loses his job, and since his work is his life, he has nothing left to live for. He goes home, throws all of his belongings into the alley outside of his apartment and prepares to kill himself. He creates a rather ingenious device to perform the task; he rigs his exercise bike with a sharp kitchen knife that will repeatedly stab him in the chest when he turns it on. He is fully prepared to do it as well; the only thing that stops him is the ringing of his phone. Unknowingly, a family tragedy is about to give Drew a new lease on life. His sister tearfully informs him of their father's death, and she pleads with Drew to take charge of the situation. "You're the responsible one," she tells him. He drops the phone and absorbs the news, and, slowly, gets off of the bike. It's bad news, of course, but the call reminds Drew that he does have a family, and that he has responsibilities to them. Even so, at this point, his plan is to take care of the situation with his family, and THEN kill himself. He still wants out of life. It's important to note that Drew's plan is one of calm, almost eerie certainty. He has decided to punch his ticket and he is calmly prepared to do it until the phone call derails him. It shows just how much Drew's job meant to him, and how convinced he is that his life is over without it. The death of one's father would be a hard pill for anyone to swallow, and Drew must also live with the fact that he didn't know the man very well. He always made plans to spend time with his father, and always pushed them back as his life got busier. He gave up his holidays so that he could continue to work, and missed his chances to get to know his family better. Now it's too late, and he carries that guilt with him. How often have you put walls up between you and your family? We all do it at times, for various reasons, most of them stupid and immature, but we do it nonetheless. We carry small grudges for things long done, or we just refuse to set aside time to spend with them. We may say we have no choice, that we're just too busy, but there's always a choice. Take a lesson from Drew's mistake and take the time to get to know the people in your life, and spend as much time with them as you can. We never know when it will be too late. Drew's father was in his hometown of Elizabethtown in Kentucky when he died. As Drew heads to Kentucky to collect his body, he meets Claire, a relentlessly positive flight attendant. She chats with Drew on the plane (against his will at first), drawing him a map to his destination (literally, in the case of Elizabethtown) but as their relationship progresses throughout the rest of the film, she will be his guide on his journey back to discovering the things that are really important in life. The next segment of Drew's journey is familiar to everybody; once he arrives in Elizabethtown, he meets scores of un-relatives. You know, the family you've never met before in your life? In this case, they live in a different part of the country from Drew and lead very different lives than he does, which adds to his culture shock. None of them are particularly fond of Drew's mother, and they derisively refer to his side of the family as ‘the California Baylors', even though the family hasn't lived there in three decades. It's always strange to meet members of your family that you don't really know. Here are people that share your blood, but they really aren't part of your life. They hug you, kiss you, marvel at how much you've grown, ask about your life, tell you about theirs, but there's always awkwardness about it. In Drew's case, these people are also very small town minded. Slightly untrusting and suspicious of outsiders (e.g. Drew's mother) and unfamiliar customs (cremation, which Drew and his immediate family intend for Mitch). There`s a lot more to dicuss about Drew, his journey, and the interesting characters that pop up along the way. In fact, there`s room enough for one more column, which is why I will continue my examination of him next week. See you then! |
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| Casting Call Issue 15: Drew Baylor, Part Two Posted by Jason Chamberlain on 07.11.2007 In the new issue of Casting Call, Jason Chamberlain completes his two part look at Drew Baylor's journey home, from the film Elizabethtown! Hey all, and welcome to a new issue of Casting Call. Let's not waste time; last week I started looking at Drew Baylor's journey throughout the film Elizabethtown. There's plenty more to talk about, so let's get to it! When Drew arrives in Elizabethtown, he is bombarded with relatives that loved his father dearly. Here are a group of people that knew his father better than he ever did. He bonds with his cousin Jesse, who is also a bit of an outcast from the rest of the family thanks to his free spirited nature, love of music and poorly behaved son. The pair can relate to each other because neither of them have or had a close relationship with their fathers, something they both regret. Drew's troubles with fitting in with his extended family are nothing new; he's always had trouble relating to the people in his life who are not part of his career. Remember, this is a workaholic we're dealing with here. It's probably not a stretch to say that outside of his working life, Drew doesn't know himself very well, so it's easy to understand why he has trouble relating to others. That is what makes Drew's developing friendship with his cousin Jesse important; he came to Elizabethtown to collect his father and to bring him home. Past that, his intentions were still to end his life. Nowhere in his plan does he intend to get involved in anybody else's life, and to start caring about more people. But he begins to care about Jesse, and that is a big step on his road back. However, the relationship that really sets him back on course (or rather, puts him on a new one) is his growing friendship/romance with Claire. Claire is exactly the kind of person Drew needs to meet, and in a way, she saves his life. It is Claire's friendship, hope and optimism that inspire Drew to give life another chance. On his first night at his hotel in Louisville, he spends the entire night on the phone with Claire, talking about each other, their jobs, and their lives. They even share a beer over the phone, and eventually decide to meet to watch the sun rise together. This was never part of Drew's plan, mind you; but slowly and surely, he is being drawn back into life. It would be hard not to be drawn to Claire; aside from being beautiful, she is genuinely caring and she never stops looking at the bright side of life, herself, and others. During his time in Elizabethtown, Drew rebuilds himself; he stands up to his relatives and their burial plans for Mitch, he helps Jesse get his son under control, and he falls for Claire, and she for him. There's a memorial for his dad where the two sides of the family finally reconcile, and he keeps a promise he made to Claire by road tripping home instead of flying. At the beginning of the film he swore to himself that nothing would stop his plan of checking out of life; but all it really took was a trip home and a chance meeting. I'm not going to fill in the rest of the plot for you. I want you to go watch it! Instead I'm going to try and get into Drew's head a little bit more and relate his journey to you and me. Suffice to say, he doesn't kill himself in the end. Thankfully, not many of us can relate to Drew when he is considering ending his life, or rather, has decided to. Suicide may dart through the mind of everybody once or twice, but few people ever give it real consideration and even attempt it; Drew does. It's hard for us to truly understand his mindset at that point; but like I mentioned in my first column, the crux of it is Drew's love for his job. Drew's job is his life; his job is over; his life is over. The irony is that the tragedy of his father's death actually becomes his catapult back into his own life. Had he not gotten the phone call that his dad had died, he would have killed himself on that bike. Instead, the pain he feels over the death, and the chain reaction of events and meetings it sets off in his life are exactly what he needs to remember why life is worth living. No matter how important a job is to you, it can't stand up in importance to the loss of a loved one. Jobs come and go, but human life is irreplaceable. Drew will have more chances to have success in his field... but he's lost his chance to get to know his father. At least, directly. By meeting so many of his father's friends and family, he almost gets to know him by osmosis. Mitch Baylor was the kind of man who inspired unfailing love and loyalty in others, and the evidence of that, combined with Drew's memories of him, is enough. Oh, and he also has a few conversations with his father's urn. Yeah. But Claire is the one who really pulls him back; she is not just a naive, doe eyed optimist. She encourages Drew to deal with the pain he's feeling, to embrace it and not push it away. It's all part of life, and that is what she is really trying to teach him. Life isn't just about happiness and light, but it isn't just about darkness either. It's a combination of the two, and she encourages Drew to recognize that. Not even his billion dollar failure with the Spasmotica shakes her faith in him. To her it's just a failure, nothing more and nothing less, and for Claire, a failure is certainly not a reason to give up. Drew almost gave up. Have you ever thought about giving up? I'm not just talking about suicide; you don't have to end your life to stop living it. Have you ever given up on a dream, on a hope, on a passion of yours? Have you ever sold yourself short, accepted less than you wanted because it was easier to obtain than what you really wanted? I know I have... we do it for a lot of reasons... to avoid the pain of rejection, to not have to feel like we failed... it's better not to try than fail, right? WRONG. If there's something you want to do, do it. If there's someone you want to be with, tell them. Take your shot. If you get rejected, if you fail, if you lose a major shoe company a billion dollars, good! Allow yourself to feel that pain, to deal with it, and set it aside and try again. And keep trying. Don't become one of the people who live their lives so afraid to fail, they never try. Teddy Roosevelt once said, "It is not the critic who counts, the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or how the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly... who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known victory or defeat." Or, as Drew's narration pontificates at the end of the film as he holds Claire in his arms, "No true fiasco ever began as a quest for mere adequacy. The Pacific Northwestern Salmon beats itself bloody on its quest to travel hundreds of miles upstream, against the current, with a single purpose. Sex, of course. But also.... ... Life." |