Elizabethtown

Cameron Crowe has never been the most disciplined of directors. Well known for being unable to let go of his projects, his Oscar-winning Almost Famous (2000) spawned a DVD 'Bootleg Cut' that ran over two-and-a-half hours long. His latest, the wistful romantic comedy Elizabethtown, had 12 minutes pruned from it after a tour of the autumn film festival circuit. Sadly, it's not enough; like life in the eponymous Kentucky town, Crowe's film is amiable enough but slow-paced. A tribute, in part, to his late father, it's also very indulgent and rather hollow at its core.

The film begins as hotshot shoe designer Drew Baylor (Bloom) takes an almighty tumble. For the past eight years, he was been working on the oddly-named trainer, the Spasmodica, for the ultra-successful Oregon-based company Mercury Shoes (a thinly disguised take on Nike, located in the same area).

As his boss (Baldwin) informs him, the Spasmodica is a flawed design that's about to lose the company $972 million and "may cause an entire generation to return to bare feet". Quite why - or indeed how - a shoe can lose almost $1 billion we never find out. Either way, Drew loses his job, and considers suicide, saved only by the discovery that his father has just died. Instructed by his mother, Hollie (Sarandon), to head to Elizabethtown to arrange the funeral, the maudlin Drew makes for the airport where he meets Claire Colburn (Dunst), a chirpy airline attendant who bumps him up to first class and gives him her number.

Upon arrival in Kentucky, Drew meets his relatives, whom he barely knows since his parents moved to California years ago. Understandably, they all want his father to be buried at the family plot in Elizabethtown, while Hollie - who never bonded with the other side of the family - wants him to be cremated and returned home. Stuck in the middle, Drew attempts to appease everybody, all the while dealing with his own feelings of despair. While his mother threatens to take up tap-dancing lessons to diminish her grief, Drew turns to Claire and so begins a relationship that literally saves his life. Eternally upbeat, she manages to snap Drew from his funk: "You have five minutes to wallow in the delicious misery," she informs him. The question remains, will their friendship remain platonic or turn into something more?

This being a Cameron Crowe movie, the soundtrack is jam-packed with classic tracks, from U2's 'Pride' to Elton John's 'My Father's Gun'. Crowe relies on his tunes as a cheap way to move the audience. It works better when he integrates music into the plot, such as the hilarious reunion of the band fronted by Drew's cousin Jessie (Schneider), who once footed the bill at a music festival headlined by Lynyrd Skynyrd. In tribute to their idols, while playing at Drew's father's memorial, the band delivers a killer version of 'Freebird', topped by the best set-piece in the film.

With a trite script that never really engages the audience, Elizabethtown's biggest flaw is the casting of Orlando Bloom. Overshadowed by the support - the dreamy Dunst and a spiky Sarandon in particular - the young actor looks lost. But, in fairness, the bulk of the blame must be attributed to Crowe. While he removed the original finale, which saw the Spasmodica suddenly become a runaway success, it wasn't enough to save this messy film.