As Elizabethtown opens, truckloads of recalled shoes are arriving back at a warehouse. Their designer, a young man named Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom), arrives at Mercury Worldwide Shoes via helicopter, while his voiceover waxes philosophical on the nature of failure. From high up in the sky, a despondent Drew longingly eyes an emergency exit. "I'm fine," Drew informs a complete stranger when they land.

Inside the sleek, modern company headquarters, Drew is greeted with a gallery of angry stares from all he passes. Men and women, old and young, stare at Drew with undisguised contempt. In response, he repeatedly announces, "I'm fine," even though nobody asks or seems to care. Drew's voiceover continues explaining the difference between failure and fiasco: "Any fool can accomplish failure... A fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions," suggesting Drew's more intimate familiarity with the latter.

Drew is eventually greeted by Ellen (Jessica Biel), who regards him with pity before loading him on a golf cart and awkwardly driving him down the hall to Phil's (Alec Baldwin) office. As Drew explains in further voiceover, Phil is Mercury Worldwide Shoes, and most people traveling down this hallway are on their way to an important meeting. Stay tuned for more essential information about hallways.

A flashback takes us to happier times at Mercury Worldwide Shoes, where Drew sits at at desk festooned with drawings of shoes. Drew's enthusiastic voiceover explains that Phil referred to his employees as "denizens of greatness" (erroneously, it would seem). With his "I have an idea" face on, Drew stares at a computer monitor displaying a skeleton wearing shoes and kicking a soccer ball. Drew also appears to derive some inspiration from a rubber stingray he keeps on his desk.

We learn that Drew's ill-fated shoe was called "Späsmotica," and as his voiceover explains, "There are sacrifices for a goal like pure greatness." Such sacrifices include last Christmas with his family; flashback even further to last Baylor Christmas, where Drew's sister Heather (Judy Greer), his mother Hollie (Susan Sarandon), and his father (only from behind) sit around the dinner table with a framed photo of Drew at his table setting. "Where exactly is Drew, anyway?" Heather wonders aloud.

Cut to Drew at the office Christmas party, which looks a lot like Mardis Gras except everyone is clutching Späsmoticas instead of beads. Confetti rains over this corporate orgy as Drew screams joyfully, "WE'VE CONTAINED MAGIC! IN A SHOE!" The crowd erupts in whoops and hollers of ecstasy as Ellen approaches Drew seductively.

In the present, Ellen silently drops Drew off at Phil's office. Drew's voiceover provides background information on Phil's obsession with the number two, which is all we learn about Phil before Drew enters his office. Drew also offers (still in voiceover) some of his thoughts on "last looks," with which he has become extremely familiar of late.

Upon venturing into Phil's cavernous office, the first thing Drew sees is a single Späsmotica shoe in Phil's wastebasket. The meeting only goes downhill from there, as Phil informs Drew that Mercury Worldwide Shoes stands to lose $972 million as a result of Späsmotica's failure. Phil also takes Drew on a tour of the building, pointing out the basketball team and environmental watchdog group which will be dismantled on account of Drew's failure.

Several guilt-trips later, Phil sends Drew to meet with a reporter to take responsibility for his failure. By next Sunday, this article be on newstands everywhere in a magazine called Global Business Today. "Success, not greatness, is the only god the entire world served," Drew's voiceover explains as he leaves the building.

With tremendous propriety, Elizabethtown opens with a thoughtful discussion of failure. Not just failure, Drew reminds us, but fiasco: something above and beyond failure. It is immediately apparent from Drew's introductory scene not only that Cameron Crowe has seen Garden State too many times, but also that Drew is the recent victim of a fiasco and is about to suffer the consequences. Orlando Bloom's close-up gives us our first taste of the passive blinks and twitches he calls acting.

We don't learn much about Drew from his spoken words or actions. The lack of either from anyone at Mercury Worldwide Shoes suggests a lot about his character, but most of the information in these opening scenes is delivered through voiceover narration. Unfortunately, since little of Drew's voiceover makes much sense or actually drives the action of the movie, one considers the possibility that we are listening to lost tapes of Bloom working with a diction coach to master an American accent. We sincerely wish Bloom the best of luck at one day accomplishing this goal.

What we do learn from this extensive voiceover, with the help of several flashbacks, is more about how Drew ended up in his current predicament. Alone in a cubicle and allowed unparalleled access to the latest shoe-design technology such as iSkeleton, Drew designed the shoe that would eventually come to destroy society as we know it. A glimpse of his desk calendar features only a red arrow and the words "SPÄSMOTICA DELIVERY & RELEASE," an alarmingly vague notation on an otherwise alarmingly blank calendar for someone we are meant to understand as at least slightly productive.

A brief glimpse into the Baylor household indicates Drew's frequent separation from his family. As everyone sits down to Christmas dinner without him, it is not until after they say grace (and, indeed, after they all arrive at the house, say their hellos, cook dinner, enjoy a drink or two, set the table, and finally sit down in the dining room) that Heather finally asks after Drew's whereabouts. This may be due to the fact that Bloom's performance is so flat and two-dimensional that Heather mistakenly believed that Drew was actually present at the table until she asked his photograph to pass the potatoes and was summarily ignored.

In a scene depicting the boisterous office Christmas party, seemingly in honor of the "magical" Späsmotica as much as Drew himself (to say nothing of the birth of Christ), the entire staff is obviously convinced of the shoe's success. This would be the staff made up of: designers who agreed that his design would work, accountants who would have calculated the financial risk for the company should the design fail, marketers who would have tested the shoe in a big enough sampling group to know that the world would scoff at it, and executives charged to fall on the sword if the whole operation tanked and jobs were lost. If a shoe was truly capable of being $1 billion worth of bad, anyone at Mercury Worldwide Shoes who didn't raise a red flag somewhere along the line deserves their share of the blame.

Elizabethtown also wastes no time establishing its most rampant theme, that of meaningless quirk bearing little or no resemblance to actual human society. Historians of the future may come to unearth Cameron Crowe's computer, which will feature a stuck key that caused the stage direction "quirkily" to appear before every line of dialogue. Not the first, but certainly the most glaring example in this clip is Phil's obsession with the number two. Indeed, as Ellen drops Drew off at the end of the hallway, we are confronted with a museum of quirk as irrelevant as it is annoying; in the remaining 113 (!) minutes of Elizabethtown, neither Phil's obsession nor Phil himself are heard from or mentioned again, even once. Or twice.