ALOHA (Cameron Crowe). 112 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (May 29). Rating: N
Where to watch: iTunes
There’s a questing nature to much of Cameron Crowe’s cinema. He makes movies about characters who are looking for something, and make no bones about it.
Sometimes it’s redemption sometimes it’s purpose. Sometimes it’s love sometimes it’s belonging. Sometimes it’s all of those things. Crowe’s an emotional storyteller, not always a linear one, often content to follow his heroes along on their looping, convoluted journeys – as long as he gets to pick the soundtrack.
And even when he’s at his messiest, as in the scrambled Vanilla Sky, the rightly maligned Elizabethtown and the maybe-not-so-rightly maligned We Bought A Zoo, there’s usually a clear arc defining what his heroes want and how they go about finding it. There’s a vision behind the movie we’re watching. A filmmaker is in control.
Aloha is the first time he’s delivered something that feels like a genuine disaster. It’s a movie that has no clear point of view, no apparent tone and not even a semblance of dramatic tension. It feels like a project that’s trying to figure out what it wants to be even as the actors are speaking their most important lines.
Honestly, I’m not even sure it’s a movie.
I mean, on the most literal level, obviously Aloha is a movie. It is made of pictures that move, and those pictures are synchronized to a soundtrack. It will be projected in movie theatres, although probably not for long. And it does have movie stars in it – heavy hitters like Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams, and veteran scene-stealers like Alec Baldwin, Danny McBride and Bill Murray – every one of them doing the best they can to make sense of whatever scene they’re playing.
I don’t know what Aloha is about. I can tell you what happens in it, but that won’t really help. Cooper plays Brian Gilcrest, a U.S. military veteran turned civilian contractor who arrives in Hawaii to negotiate a point of protocol holding up construction on a communications base for Carson Welch (Murray), a billionaire industrialist about to launch a private satellite.
Upon landing, he meets Stone’s super-eager Captain Allison Ng – who’s half-Swedish and half-Chinese-Hawaiian and no, even Emma Stone cannot sell that – and reconnects with McAdams’s Tracy Woodside, an ex-girlfriend now married to a taciturn pilot (John Krasinski) with whom Brian clearly has some history.
That’s the first five minutes, which sets up these characters with clear personalities and motivations. And then Crowe spends the rest of it trying to figure out what kind of film he’s making, shoving these characters into scenes that feel like they could be steered into one sort of movie or another, depending on what other ideas he’ll come up with tomorrow.
There are scenes designed for romantic comedy, with Brian and Allison squabbling attractively in stunning tropical locations. There are scenes sculpted for melancholy drama, as Brian is drawn back into Tracy’s orbit and finds their past is still very much alive. And then there are the scenes that feel like outtakes from a military satire, as Brian and Tracy separately discover Welch’s private satellite program has a considerably darker purpose than he’s publicly acknowledged.
It’s that last section that tells me Crowe hadn’t the slightest clue what he was doing, since what happens in those scenes totally unbalances the rest of the movie. You wind up wondering why certain characters would be wasting time having brunch with each other knowing the things they know – and why Crowe treats what’s happening so casually.
The answer, I think, is that Crowe doesn’t know how to do anything else. He throws out ideas and sees what works. He famously recuts his movies until they make sense – until he finds their hearts – and when he’s at his best, we get something like Almost Famous, where both the theatrical and extended versions are satisfying, legitimately wonderful things.
The easy joke to make about Aloha is that it just isn’t finished that a little more time in the editing bay might have led Crowe to figure out what the movie was, and shape it into something more satisfying. But I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think there’s anything there at all.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
