Comedy and romance come from suicidal inclination
When Drew Baylor, played by Orlando Bloom, gets fired from his job and goes home to kill himself using a self-propelling knife attached to an exercise bike, it is clear that this will be a quirky tale.
Baylor, a young shoe designer, has failed miserably in his newest design of a shoe with silver flaps, costing the company $972 million.
Phil DeVoss, his conniving, unemotional boss played by Alec Baldwin, spends no time in condolences and instead calls Baylor to own up to his fiasco to a waiting reporter.
“I am ill-equipped in the philosophy of failure,” he says and then adds sarcastically, “I think that you should stand up for your incredible work.”
Baylor then seeks to end his life using the comic-looking death machine that sent the audience into nervous giggles. He fails to do so, however, due to unreliable duct tape and a phone call from his sister to tell him that his father is dead.
On the way to retrieve the body, he is the only one on the flight and thus is singled out by a darling but frightfully annoying flight attendant named Claire Colburn, played by Kirsten Dunst.
She pries into his life and addresses important life questions, but because of her child-like nature, the audience laughs her off as silly and unworthy of adequate attention.
Upon saying goodbye to Baylor, Colburn says in her coy yet honest way as she hands him her phone number, “We are intrepid; we carry on.”
Baylor arrives in Elizabethtown after getting severely lost along the way, even stopping on the open road to beat the horn and yell at his stupidity, and is finally pointed to the direction of the funeral home by the quirky town members.