World Traveler

Bart Freundlich's sophomore feature (following 1997's The Myth of Fingerprints) is like a slick coffee-table magazine filled with beautifully composed, luminously shot individual photos but devoid of meaningful content. The central character is Cal (Billy Crudup), a blankly handsome young architect who abandons his wife and son in New York to traipse about the country, eventually reaching an Oregon destination where the motive behind his peregrinations is revealed. (One of the many people he meets along the way is a troubled woman played by Freundlich's wife Julianne Moore, but it's a thankless, badly-written role.) The message seems to be that everyone must come to terms with the past, however painful it might be, but despite its lovely surface World Traveler is a maddeningly meandering movie, an exercise in cinematic navel-gazing that for all its driving doesn't get us get very far. Not recommended. (F. Swietek)