‘You sold your soul so many times nobody’s buying anymore…’
I often think that people don’t realise how rare it is for someone to be able to create something that connects with a wide audience and then endures beyond the moment in which it was first released. What’s rarer still is for someone to be able to do that consistently. History is littered with musicians, filmmakers and artists who had the juice then seemingly lost it forever. Cameron Crowe made some of the most beloved films of the ’90s, and could seemingly do no wrong, and then he made the less universally loved Vanilla Sky, and then the universally loathed Elizabethtown and that was pretty much it. Crowe lost whatever magic he previously had. We Bought a Zoo stopped the rot somewhat, but Aloha, released in 2015, is a film that has very few redeeming features. For all its (many) flaws, Elizabethtown still feels very much like a Cameron Crowe film. Aloha is a bad cover version of Crowe’s best work…
There are two plots here. A love triangle between disgraced military contractor Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper), much younger Air Force pilot Allison Ng (Emma Stone) and Brian’s ex-girlfriend, Tracy (Rachel McAdams). The second plot is some absolute nonsense about a satellite. The starry supporting cast includes Bill Murray, John Krasinski, Danny McBride, Alec Baldwin and Bill Camp. And yet, every single one of them is utterly wasted.
This film is a total mess. Despite being in development for many years, the script feels unfinished, the choppy editing means the film is somehow both too quick in terms of pacing and incredibly dull, and none of the actors seems to believe in the project. Crowe clearly has the capacity to be an incredible writer; Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire are both perfectly written movies, but some of the dialogue here is genuinely atrocious. At one point, Stone’s character ponders, “Can you think of a way to make ‘I’m a fighter pilot’ sexy?”… I mean, what are we doing here? And this is without mentioning the elephant in the room, which is, of course, having a film about and set in Hawaii with a majority white cast. This would be more forgivable if the film itself wasn’t also totally without merit, but the whitewashing scandal combined with the fact that the film is awful in every other respect makes this a depressing cinematic experience.
It is now 11 years since Cameron Crowe directed anything on the big screen and if Aloha is anything to go by, maybe he shouldn’t come back. This is a film by a man who is out of shit. Sometimes, people just lose it. I fear this is one of those times.
