(AP) -- From "Say Anything ..." to "Almost Famous," Cameron Crowe has made his name with movies that strike just the right tone -- a bittersweet balance that's funny and melancholy, romantic and observant. It's one that his late idol, Billy Wilder, perfected decades ago, and one that's hard to achieve.Which is what makes "Elizabethtown" so curious, and such a disappointment.In telling the story of a young man who returns to his small-town Kentucky roots after his father's death, it's as if writer-director Crowe wanted to make several different movies but couldn't decide between them, so he just went ahead and made them all, then trimmed for time.Characters say and do things that real people don't say and do, and they frequently come up with poignant turns of phrase that are so perfectly timed, they clang self-consciously -- especially Kirsten Dunst as the perky flight attendant with whom Orlando Bloom's character strikes up an unexpected romance.Likable individually and refreshing as a couple, they do have some lovely moments together, though. Crowe told Bloom, the British hottie from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy playing his first role as a Yank, to watch the Wilder classic "The Apartment" repeatedly and study Jack Lemmon's performance. While Bloom in no way comes close to achieving Lemmon's iconic comic skill and everyman vulnerability, he proves himself a reliable straightman, especially compared to Dunst, clearly functioning here as the effervescent, optimistic Shirley MacLaine figure in the equation.Bloom's Drew Baylor meets Dunst's Claire Colburn while flying as the lone passenger on a red-eye from Portland, Oregon, to Louisville, Kentucky, en route to Elizabethtown, where his father died suddenly during a visit back home. Drew's mother (Susan Sarandon) and sister (Judy Greer) are totally incapable of coping -- though they're so giggly and manic, you'd never know that they'd just lost the family patriarch -- so they send Drew to fetch his body and bring it back to be cremated.Drew was seriously thinking of killing himself when he got the news. A designer for a thinly veiled version of Nike -- complete with a boss named Phil, played with cliched Zen-like self-control by Alec Baldwin -- Drew just lost the company nearly a billion dollars with an athletic shoe he spent eight years developing. ("I am ill-equipped in the philosophies of failure," Phil informs him.)So nothing is going right for Drew, and he's not exactly in the mood for getting-to-know-you conversation with chatty Claire in the middle of the night. ("Phils are dangerous," she chirps when Drew tells her his boss' name. "Phils are less predictable than Bens.")She eventually wears him down through the sheer force of her kindness, though, and even draws him a map of where he needs to go once he lands, including her phone numbers.Surrounded by well-meaning but overbearing strangers in the mythically idyllic Elizabethtown, most of them relatives he'd never met, Drew finds himself reaching out to Claire with an all-night cell-phone call. They talk easily and about everything -- this is one of those sections of the movie that feels like a movie unto itself -- and when they agree many hours later to get in their cars and meet halfway to watch the sunrise, their face-to-face reunion is adorably awkward.That they've made this intense connection isn't so unbelievable in itself; it's how the relationship develops that becomes hard to fathom. She cancels a free trip to Hawaii, for example, to spend more time with this person she just met. She ingratiates herself with the wedding party going on at the hotel where he's staying, just to be around for him.And the most extreme example of all: Claire creates for Drew an elaborate map for him to follow during his solitary road trip back home -- a trip that was her idea in the first place. It's more like a scrapbook, really -- an annotated guide with photographs and sticky notes and mix CDs full of appropriate songs for every mile of the tour. The most painfully obvious: U2's "Pride (In the Name of Love)" as Drew visits the National Civil Rights Museum, built at the site where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.It's a sweet idea -- just difficult to accept, even in a movie with romantic inclinations. How could she possibly have found the time to be so Martha Stewart-craftsy? And it's yet another segment that Crowe might have wanted to develop into a film all its own.As Drew tries to assure himself in the movie's opening voiceover, "A failure is simply the non-presence of success. ... A fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.""Elizabethtown" falls closer to the former than the latter.Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.