MOVIE REVIEW Does director even know focus of 'Elizabethtown' ?

The film sorely lacks character development.
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
KANSAS CITY STAR
"Elizabethtown" is a romantic comedy.
No, it's a satire of the corporate world.
Or maybe it's a fish-out-of-water yarn about a city boy transformed by his country cousins.
Actually, one can't be sure what "Elizabethtown" is, a problem obviously shared with the film's creator, Cameron Crowe.
Crowe, the nab behind such pleasing work as "Say Anything," "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous" (we shall discreetly ignore "Vanilla Sky"),is trying to do so much with his latest movie that he comes close to doing nothing at all. There are moments in the film's first hour when "Elizabethtown" seems poised to click into high gear and take off. But it never quite happens, and the second hour is a total mess.
So what's left? A few sublime moments, a couple of good laughs, a dose of eye candy in the form of Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst. But you'll forget this one before you get the key into your ignition.
The premise
Drew (Bloom) is a corporate golden boy on a downward spiral. He's risen from the ranks of designers at an Oregon athletic footwear company (think Nike) to launch a brand new shoe called the Spasmotica. The name says it all. Drew's disaster will cause the company and its owner (Alec Baldwin in the sort of sharp supporting performance that has made him Hollywood's best utility player) to lose $1 billion.
Drew's job and reputation are toast. He's rigging his fancy exercise bike to serve as a suicide machine when he receives news that his father has died on a visit to his hometown in Kentucky. Drew's mom (Susan Sarandon) asks him to fly to Elizabethtown and bring the body back to the West Coast.
On the redeye flight our glum hero encounters a chatty, chirpy cabin attendant, Claire (Dunst), who right off the bat seems to know Drew better than he knows himself. She gives him her phone number if he needs someone to talk to.
Once in Elizabethtown, Drew is amazed to find that everyone from local cops to kids on bicycles knew and loved his father. He finds himself part of a huge extended family of distant aunts, uncles and cousins whom he barely remembers from childhood. They're loving, opinionated, funny, eccentric and willing to forgive Drew his "California" attitude.
Of the two main plot threads, Drew's relationship with his small-town relatives is the most promising. Crowe knows how to evoke the happy chaos of a big family reunion with screaming kids, nonstop cooking and endless libations.
By comparison Drew's romance with Claire seems forced and unnatural -- probably because Claire has been conceived less as a flesh-and-blood individual than as a dream girl embodying all the best elements of feminine compassion and spunkiness.
In fact, very few of the performances in "Elizabethtown" go beyond skin deep. Maybe it has to do with the movie's so-so reception at the Toronto Film Festival; after that, Crowe trimmed 20 minutes from the film and a lot of it must have been character development.