This is a strange cinema experience. Just over two hours… of what?

The plotline had potential: bright young man’s shoe invention fails and leads to huge company debts; in the meantime his father dies and he has to leave California to collect the body in Kentucky; his Kentucky kin are friendly but want the father buried there; he befriends a rather desperately extraverted flight attendant; his mother and sister come to the funeral… Actually, it doesn’t end there, but that’s another matter.

The shoe thing is made much of at first with Orlando Bloom (wilting more than a little as he ponders failure and fiasco) reassuring himself with repetitions of ‘I’m fine’ and then confronting the boss (Alec Baldwin, slightly manic as if he were still in court confronting Kim Basinger about child custody). Things are a bit manic at home, especially with Mum (Susan Sarandon) going gung-ho on cooking, stand-up comedy and tap-dancing to deal with her grief.

This is all more than just whimsical – and he has not yet met Kirsten Dunst as the incessantly talking flight attendant. He does not have to be with her for the chat and chatter – we have one of the longest mobile phone conversations in cinema history. (Let’s hope it puts a stop to imitations and homages!)

There’s a lot more but, as the film goes on and one listens to the dialogue, the confusion concerning what’s it all about is not allayed. So much of the dialogue is articulately inconsequential. So, it stops and starts, pauses and digresses (especially with a show-stopping performance where the plot is put on hold for a tour-de-force speech, song and dance by Susan Sarandon at her husband’s wake, and a suggestive story that makes all the previously antagonistic relatives and Kentuckians just love her). Cameron Crowe (as we know from his semi-autobiographical Almost Famous) was a music journalist so he accompanies the plot with continuous hits from the past.

And the ending…? The timeline of all of this makes little sense. Four days are mentioned at one stage but how so much could be done in four days defies belief – and a complainant on the IMDb points out that big jets do not fly from LA to Louisville, so there!). Kirsten has organised a car trip for Orlando back to California with stops programmed to the minute and music to accompany each emotional moment (all when she should have been working on flights to Hawaii).

Perhaps it is just that Elizabethtown is a modern American fairytale land that does not entice audiences to believe in it.

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