A tennis shoe designer (Orlando Bloom) is responsible for a sneaker that has become a mortal fiasco for his company. Dumped by his girlfriend and fired by his boss (Alec Baldwin), he opts to kill himself. But he fails there too when he gets a call from his sister (Judy Greer) to notify him that their father has died.

Neither Greer, nor their mother – Susan Sarandon, taking a part that Jane Fonda dropped out of – is stable enough to attend the funeral in the rural Kentucky village of Elizabethtown, so Bloom is sent to handle the details. He meets a whimsical young stewardess on the plane. She’s played by Kristen Dunst, the real bright spot of the film, who does a remarkable job channeling Carole Lombard in a true movie star performance. Through their relationship, Bloom comes to learn that failure and death are not necessarily an end.

Written and directed by Cameron Crowe, the former teenage Rolling Stone correspondent who is credited with four of the classic romantic drama comedies of his generation – Fast Times At Ridgemont High (for which he adapted his novel to screen), and Say Anything …, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, which he also directed.

Elizabethtown is like a big rig that collapses a bridge that’s been driven across too many times. It’s the first disaster Crowe has been party to in an otherwise respectable career.

Much has been written about a poorly received screening at the Toronto Film Festival that Crowe used to cut about 18 minutes from the running time and reshape the movie. There are so many storylines here which seem important, but are then dropped completely, that it’s impossible to tell what was left on the cutting room floor or what Crowe never bothered figuring out from the get-go.

Why did Bloom’s shoe flop? Did Alec Baldwin fire him or not? Was his girlfriend (Jessica Biel) really his girlfriend, or not? Have they really broken up, or not? When we spend more time during a movie guessing whether the deleted scenes on the DVD will explain everything than we do emotionally involved in the story and characters, something went very wrong.

While the film’s shoot was delayed to accommodate Orlando Bloom, another romantic comedy beat this one to the theaters. It was also about a despondent man in his twenties who flies home for a parent’s funeral, meets a whimsical girl who opens his eyes to the joys of life and wakes him up from his funk. It was called Garden State. One of the reasons the Zach Braff picture is so much better than this one is that he took care to document the nuances in which real people have real conversations with each other.

The romance between Bloom & Dunst corresponds with nothing we know as reality. Their attraction seems based on little more than Bloom getting realizations off his chest, then Dunst making a revelation. Crowe has written great dialogue in the past, but here, characters speak with cereal box pathos (“Men see life as a box. Women see it as a round room.”)

I can’t remember Jeff Spicoli spouting any universal truths in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Neither did Mister Hand. They existed as portrayals of real people by Sean Penn and Ray Walston and that in itself revealed a universal truth.

Dunst’s character is essentially telling Bloom’s what to feel, what to think and what he should be making out of life at every mile marker. It gets tedious. Kind of like this movie.