Kirsten Dunst, top, and Orlando Bloom star in "Elizabethtown." Click photo for larger image. "Elizabethtown" Rating: PG-13 for language and some sexual references. Starring: Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst. Director: Cameron Crowe. "Elizabethtown" Web site Post-Gazette Family Film Guide review of "Elizabethtown"

"Elizabethtown" has a big heart. An enlarged heart, you might say -- which is not a good thing, as doctors will tell you.

Written and directed by Cameron Crowe, "Elizabethtown" stars dreamboat Orlando Bloom as Drew Baylor, a designer for Mercury Worldwide Shoes (think Nike) who has spent the past eight years working on a model intended to approximate walking on a cloud.

"Any fool can accomplish failure, but a fiasco, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions," Drew says in the voiceover, and his footwear is a fiasco. Mercury is about to lose $972 million, while Drew will lose his job, his girlfriend and maybe his life, as he contemplates ending it all.

But a fateful phone call brings word that his father has died of a heart attack in Elizabethtown, Ky., and he is charged with bringing him back to Oregon. On the plane to Kentucky, Drew meets a sunny, relentlessly helpful flight attendant named Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who provides him with maps real and otherwise and a reminder about what's important in life.

She's just part of the picture, though, as Drew encounters an entire town of relatives and friends who adored his father and expect he will be buried in the centuries-old Baylor family plot. But that doesn't fit with the plans of his mother (Susan Sarandon), who is drawn into the drama, too.

Much has been made of Crowe's decision to trim 17 minutes from his first cut of this movie. Many of the edits are invisible, but a few are not, resulting in some bumpiness and information that isn't as well fleshed out as it could be.

The main problem with "Elizabethtown" is that it starts and finishes strong -- there is a lovely, music-soaked road trip that is a valentine to America -- but is flabby in the middle.

The story is very ambitious, with threads about Drew, Claire, his mother, who grieves in an annoyingly wacky way, Elizabethtown relatives who include a cousin with an out-of-control son, wedding guests who have taken over the hotel where Drew is staying (admittedly a funny bit), a funeral director who cannot fathom the concept of cremation and much more.

Having said all that, it's impossible not to be moved by Drew's flashbacks of his dad and that first moment when he sees his father in the casket. Drew goes to take his father's hand but flinches at how cold and lifeless it is -- and then grasps it and holds it.

And Crowe nails the sort of gathering where children are running in circles, dogs are barking and eyeing the dinner ham and long-lost relatives try to give Drew a crash course in the family tree or insist they're doppelgangers when they look nothing like him.

At the heart of all this is the burgeoning relationship between Drew and Claire, which borders on making your teeth hurt because it's so sweet.

"Elizabethtown" gives the British Bloom the chance to play a clean-shaven, contemporary American without the crutches of period costumes or weaponry or the brilliant baggage of "Lord of the Rings." His Drew is a man understandably saddened, stunned and overwhelmed by everything that's happening.

In the end, watching "Elizabethtown" is like taking a trip where you start off religiously following your AAA directions. Then, you miss a turn or encounter a detour or decide to go onto the backroads in search of home cooking. You get a little lost, spend more time and gasoline than intended, but arrive at the destination a little wiser than before.