Well,
it has finally dawned on me that I might be in an abusive relationship with
filmmaker Cameron Crowe. Things were just so good at the beginning, with “Say
Anything…,” “Singles,” “Jerry Maguire,” and “Almost Famous,” all perfect in
their own unique way yet thrumming with beautifully universal truths. But at
the turn of the century whatever we had quickly went south, thanks to the
atrocious one-two punchline of “Vanilla Sky” and “Elizabethtown.” Of course I
convinced myself that Crowe could change, only to be insulted after a 6-year
wait with “We Bought a Zoo,” a derivative and manipulative family flick. “One
more chance,” I vowed, hoping it could be like it was before. So it breaks my
heart to think that we’re through: Crowe’s latest, the incoherent romantic
comedy “Aloha,” could actually be the worst film of his career.
Bradley Cooper leads a stacked but
squandered cast as Brian Gilcrest, former military
now working for a weird billionaire (Bill Murray in hammy paycheck mode) whose plans to launch a satellite demand Gilcrest’s
presence in Hawaii. Emma Stone’s feisty USAF Captain Allison Ng is assigned to
accompany Brian on his goodwill mission for reasons seemingly related only to
rom-com law. Complicating matters is Tracy Woodside (Rachel McAdams), Gilcrest’s ex-girlfriend still clearly suffering from a
lack of closure despite the fact that Brian left Hawaii 13 years earlier. Now
married (to an uncharacteristically hot John Krasinski),
Tracy has two kids, one of them a 12-year-old daughter who — oh, shush; I’m not
ruining anything. It’s literally the first thought anyone would have … anyone
except Brian, that is, because apparently that’s third-act thinkin’.
To be fair, Brian has a ton on his
mind because his life has fallen apart; marry that fact to his prodigal-son
return to Hawaii and Stone’s obnoxiously screwball riff on the Manic Pixie
Dream Girl, and it seems that Crowe basically chose to remake “Elizabethtown,”
the film that arguably derailed Orlando Bloom’s career and did zero favors for
his own. “Aloha” tries to incorporate way too much plot and intrigue — I really
had no idea what was going on for the first half-hour — in service to a
standard-issue Crowe-mance, then stops just shy of
completely offending our newest state with its condescending lower-48
imperialism. Hawaii’s famous landscape and complicated native culture are
essentially deployed here to provide a mystical backdrop for haole problems, and making Stone’s character one-quarter
Hawaiian does not excuse this, though it is hilarious.
What’s incredibly frustrating is
that the performances are all pretty good despite what the actors were given to
work with. Cooper always seems a tiny bit unhinged behind his wide blue eyes,
and it’s not difficult to buy his extremes of behavior. Stone could stand to
rely a little less on her own peepers to emote, but there’s little doubt she’s
playing her male-fantasy archetype exactly as ignorantly written. (Note to
Crowe: “I’m a fighter pilot” sounds sexy coming from anyone, dummy.) The
graceful McAdams is a consistently underappreciated presence, but her character
verges on the irrelevant, existing solely to help redeem our hero. Krasinski has maybe five lines — the joke here is that he
doesn’t say anything — but the singular talents of Murray, Alec Baldwin as a
spitting-mad general, and especially Danny McBride as a one-man Greek chorus,
are all wasted.
The mediocrity is unquestionably on
the other side of the camera; for instance, how was French cinematographer Eric
Gautier — the same guy who shot Olivier Assayas’
stunning “Summer Hours,” incidentally — able to make Hawaii look so
uninspiring? Granted, there are a couple good scenes — Stone and Murray dancing
to Hall & Oates springs to mind — but they feel dropped in from a better
movie, one without a clichรฉd and convoluted script that fairly reeks of
desperation.
And it’s not like we weren’t warned
about “Aloha” as a result of that notorious Sony email hack last December: “I’m
never starting a movie again when the script is ridiculous and we al (sic) know
it,” Sony honcho Amy Pascal reportedly wrote of the then-untitled Cameron Crowe
project. Crowe is clearly out of ideas, and at the risk of blaming the victim,
I guess it’s my fault for expecting anything different.
This article appears in Jun 3-9, 2015.
