World Traveler (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

It was meant to be a tear-jerker for guys. That's a difficult type of film to manage successfully. Men do rate it fairly high at IMDb (6.4 - about two and a half stars), and its guy-flick status is confirmed by the fact that women rate it 1.3 points lower (a difference of 1 point indicates extreme gender preference), but male reviewers generally disliked it, and so did I.

Billy Crudup plays a successful Manhattan architect who pulls a Rabbit Angstrom and just walks out of his life one day.  He gets in his Volvo station wagon and looks for ...

Well, that's the problem. He doesn't really know what he's looking for, and neither do we. He's dissatisfied with his life, but his life seems pretty damned satisfactory to us, and his sense of displacement is vague and unarticulated. He drives around for a couple of days and has sex with Karen Allen. Then he makes friends with a construction worker who is a reformed alcoholic, but then he gets the guy drunk and makes a pass at his wife.

Then Crudup meets a high school classmate who despises him. That kind of stuff.

He resolves to do something good for someone as kind of an atonement plan, so he offers a ride to a woman who is trying to meet with her young son. It turns out that the woman is crazy and the son is imaginary, so Crudup leaves her stranded at a Dairy Queen somewhere in the remote Northwest. So much for that good deed.

He finally ends up visiting his own estranged father, who walked out on him and his mother 22 years earlier. Since Crudup has just walked out on his own wife and son, doing the same thing that caused him to hate his own father, he thinks that he should try to understand himself better by understanding his father better.

The movie is slow, rambling and unfocused, but those aren't the deal breakers. There are enough positives to overcome those liabilities, like a sad Willie Nelson score, and a strange, luminous performance from Julianne Moore as the crazy woman. The real flaw in the film is that the Billy Crudup character is self-centered and completely unlikable, but  he's the protagonist, we view events through his eyes, and he's on screen almost 100% of the time. Therefore, there is no character for the audience to identify with, and watching Crudup have some adventures is a real chore.