Writer-director Bart Freundlich's 1997 debut, The Myth Of Fingerprints, was one of those cases when the title worked like a warning label for the toxic contents within. Precious and obscure, featuring neither a myth nor fingerprints, the film brought the independent movement to a new level of self-parody, applying the worst navel-gazing excesses of '60s European art cinema to the privileged, bloodless New Englanders of American short fiction. Given his tendencies, Freundlich should be kept at least 100 yards from the road-movie genre at all times. But he discards the restraining order with his follow-up, World Traveler, a hopelessly stolid and distant evocation of Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces. Both films take a calculated risk by asking the audience to care for a wealthy, self-centered womanizer and malcontent as he journeys home to confront the past and understand the roots of his problems. Yet even at his character's petulant worst—perhaps especially at his worst—Jack Nicholson used his searing Pieces performance to suggest a man whose abuses reflected a deeper anguish within. Paradoxically, he drew greater sympathy the more he batted it away. Freundlich, on the other hand, can only answer with a cipher, offering up a genuinely thoughtless and unlikable hero who inflicts more pain than he can possibly absorb, in spite of Billy Crudup's humanizing efforts in the lead role. In the throes of a premature midlife crisis, Crudup flees his cozy Manhattan apartment on the day of his son's birthday party, leaving behind his loving wife of six years and taking their Volvo station wagon cross-country to the Oregon coast, with several detours along the way. The open road gives him the freedom to self-destruct, courtesy of the bottle and a succession of one-night stands. As he approaches a reunion with his long-lost father (David Keith), Crudup looks for a little redemption by helping Julianne Moore, an alcoholic hitchhiker, connect with her son, the product of a broken marriage. But he mostly just stares off into space and wallows in self-pity, lamenting a life that other people could only dream of enjoying. The character builds up so much bad will that it's fitting when the film's liveliest scene, a chance airport-lounge meeting between Crudup and a forgotten high-school friend (James LeGros), finally throws Crudup's sins back in his face. World Traveler could have used several more splashes of cold water to wake from its stupor, but Freundlich loses himself in travelogue sunsets, an Edward Albee twist, and arty dream sequences that symbolize the obvious. In searching for a soul, both for the hero and the movie, his only solution is to haunt the soundtrack with Willie Nelson songs and hope Nelson's plaintive voice fills the void.