But something gets lost in translation here. The idea that families are shell-shocked by a sudden death is perfectly believable. And when someone close to us dies, we sometimes need more than the rest of our own lifetime to figure out what that person meant to us. But in the world of this story, Mitch is something of a mystery to everyone except his Kentucky relatives. His children and wife act as if he's someone they barely knew -- through much of the movie I wondered if Hollie and Mitch were estranged, given the fact she'd treated the retrieval of his body as if it were a grocery errand. In fact, by the time Drew shows up in Elizabethtown, Mitch's extended family and buddies have already embalmed the body, perused the casket catalog, and marked off his burial plot, as if this were completely normal behavior for friends and relations to engage in without consulting the widow or the children. Eventually, Drew mentions the cremation thing -- there's even a zanily romantic urn-shopping montage, in which Drew and Claire search for the perfect bone pot -- and the townsfolk reluctantly acquiesce.

But even if you steadfastly decide not to let expectations of realism or logic get in the way -- because there are times when you just have to enter the emotional zone of a movie and not get hung up on details -- there are too many angles of "Elizabethtown" that just don't resonate, emotionally or otherwise. Drew and Claire make their first significant connection when Drew impulsively phones her from his hotel room: Crowe cuts from Claire in her apartment (cleaning the litter box, painting her toenails) to Drew in his suite (he's somehow become part of a wedding entourage that's staying at the hotel, so he's wrapped himself in a white terry bathrobe nabbed from one of the nuptial goodie bags), capturing the rambling texture of the conversation, the way it goes from here to there even as it seemingly goes nowhere. As always, Crowe uses pop music so organically, and with so much unvarnished feeling, that it serves as a kind of spackle for the movie's myriad flaws in craftsmanship: Drew has a private moment with his dad's body set to Elton John's "My Father's Gun," and it's one of the few moments that give us any sense of what the father-son relationship must have been like.

But so much of "Elizabethtown" just leaves you asking, Why? Why does Hollie decide, right after her husband's death, that she positively must learn to cook, fix cars, and tap-dance? (All of that's explained later in a eulogy that's supposed to be wackily charming. But even this supposedly heartfelt scene just feels tacked on as a way of justifying the grief-loony whirlwind of cooking, car fixing and tap-dancing -- an overly coy, fancy way of asserting that everyone grieves in his or her own way.) Why does Heather seem as if she's barely a part of the family -- just somebody who's handy to have around for making phone calls? Why does Drew, upon his arrival in Kentucky, act as if he's never seen a front porch before, or known anyone who knew how to bake a pie? (Even if Drew hailed from the Bronx and not Oregon, the aw-shucks wonder of it all would still seem disingenuous.) Why does Claire have to dispense knobby truisms like "Men see things in a box, and women see them in a round room"?

All of the actors in "Elizabethtown" seem to be dancing as fast as they can, trying to make it all work: Bloom, good-looking as he is, is a dim shape of a romantic presence, but at least there's something soulful about his eyes. And Dunst, saddled with the thankless role of the bright, sensitive woman who has to explain everything to the perpetually clueless guy, throws off a few subtle flashes of sharpness -- more than may have been written into the role in the first place.

Once in a while the picture springs to life, as in the coda, a road-trip sequence that includes footage of a spot in Memphis that, to me, feels truly sacred, the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. But there's so much in "Elizabethtown" that seems to have been included only for effect -- like the giant papier-mbchi dove that catches fire during a soaring cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird." It sure looks good. But it's an empty image. Crowe knows how to use pop music to give a scene shape and meaning, and he certainly has a big heart. But sometimes good intentions just make a mess. "Elizabethtown," like that decorative dove, is a construct that doesn't throw off the emotion that it should. It's a flight of whimsy that goes down in flames.

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