BLOOM AMONG THE RUBES

REVIEWED - ELIZABETHTOWN: Cameron Crowe's unbearable romcom offers up a twee, patronising view of the American heartland, writes Donald Clarke

Early on in Cameron Crowe's unendurably tedious new film, the watchful viewer may spy a visual pointer as to what - in the name of heaven, what? - the director thinks he's up to.

When Drew Baylor (an Orlando Bloom-shaped hole), the designer of a ruinously unattractive sports shoe, goes to receive a drubbing from his boss (Alec Baldwin), he passes a pair of wholesome Norman Rockwell paintings. Having riffed on smart-alec sports agents in Jerry Maguire, smart-alec rock stars in Almost Famous and smart-alec socialites in Vanilla Sky, Crowe is now bringing us among the plain people of America. This is his tribute to those flag-waving rural fellows who can go for years on end without selling Kate Hudson into rock'n'roll servitude.

Sure enough, just as our hero is about to commit suicide, he receives a phone call telling him that his father has passed away while visiting decent, hard-working (and so on) relatives way down there in Kentucky. Mom (Susan Sarandon) can't cope, so Drew flies south to organise the funeral.

Elizabethtown is a fair-minded film from one of the most civilised men in Hollywood. That is its problem. A less humane picture from a less humane director would see the Baylors of Elizabethtown - gap-toothed, tobacco-stained - boiling their relative in his own blood after stripping his flesh with rusty pitch-forks. Instead, these rosy-cheeked citizens, only slightly more ambulatory than the subjects of Baldwin's Rockwells, cluck round Drew with good humour so aggressively hearty it precludes the development of any tension or drama.

When he's not being fed pumpkin pie, Drew spends his time exchanging inanities with the annoyingly chipper flight attendant (Kirsten Dunst, properly bad for the first time) who kept him awake all the way across the Rockies. They discuss love, sunsets, death and - this being a Cameron Crowe film - drippy music. Nothing they say is worth waking up to listen to.

So why did Paramount let Crowe away with this interminable fiasco? One suspects the studio treasures his middlebrow talent as the sort of entity that draws in awards. Nothing else can explain the inclusion of a toe-curling sequence in which Sarandon, after berating the hicks with a risque anecdote, dances badly before them to the strains of Moon River. Such grandstanding turns can secure Best Supporting Actress nods. This one most assuredly will not.

Worse follows in the long final act, during which Drew drives home listening to music selected by the, it seems, numbingly literal-minded trolly dolly. Eventually he stops at the Memphis motel where Martin Luther King was shot.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell, only somebody with a heart of stone could observe Orlando Bloom mopily listening to U2's Pride (In the Name of Love) at such a venue without gagging.