The new film from Bart Freundlich, who made "The Myth of Fingerprints," is called "World Traveler," although the voyager in question, Cal (Billy Crudup), fails to rack up a single frequent-flier mile in the course of the movie. In fact, he never even leaves his native land. Cal's itinerary passes from sea to shining sea, starting in New York and winding up in Oregon; it is the tale of a roving eye, poised between a journey of self- discovery and a rake's progress, although a less tasteful and reflective film, one with a more vulgar spirit of inquiry, might have stumbled upon the radical possibility that the two can be the same.
Cal has a wife and young son in New York, whom he leaves without warning or farewell. (Their anguish at losing him, which must be harsh and specific compared with his nebulous unease, is barely touched upon.) He stops at a diner, and ends up in bed with a waitress (Karen Allen); later, he befriends a construction worker named Carl (Cleavant Derricks), although the effect of that friendship is to drag Carl back to the booze and almost cuckold him; then comes a hitchhiker, Meg (Liane Balaban), who is so lovely and unscrewy that she and Cal have no option but to part; finally, Cal takes up with Dulcie (Julianne Moore), a headlong drinker with problems—otherwise known as malignant fantasies—of her own. Much of this is managed with finesse, and Freundlich casts ravishing glances at the passing landscape, with its pairing of the downbeat and the monumental—Dairy Queens and 7- Elevens crouched at the feet of elephantine hills. But a sense of striving overpowers the movie, and any deftness is sunk by the realization that Cal is heading for a rapprochement with his estranged father (David Keith); all the women along the way, it transpires, were just signposts, therapeutic markers, on the path to a Guy Thing. I worry about Billy Crudup; when you are insanely good-looking, you need to ration your high-cheekbone roles, with their instant solemnity, and loosen up with comedy, light or low. The scooter-riding, self-deprecating Gregory Peck of "Roman Holiday" was twice as memorable as his Ahab, and the Crudup of "Almost Famous" was both hairier and more appealing than the tortured womanizer of "World Traveler." Couldn't Cal have just stayed home, grown a mustache, and called his dad on the phone?Copyright © 2002 New Yorker