The concerns were real. The fears have been confirmed. The piling on is justified. Cameron Crowe’s latest film, Aloha, is a total mess.
You might guess that the movie couldn’t go wrong with Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone as lead actors. Having two of Hollywood’s biggest stars to headline his film looked like great fortune for Crowe, in addition to filling out the rest of the cast with Rachel McAdams, John Krasinski, Danny McBride and Bill Murray. Attracting that kind of a talent is a testament to Crowe’s previous work, to his abilities as a writer. But even the best ensemble can’t make substandard material shine.
Aloha just feels completely unfocused, like a collection of scenes that Crowe couldn’t tie together into a cohesive story. Watching it is like being in a writing workshop class. There are parts that work, and several scenes have potential. But you keep waiting for the end of the workshop, when you can give notes and feedback to the writer and tell him what improvements he could consider.
Early in the movie, Brian Gilcrist (Cooper) and Allison Ng (Stone) are bantering and bickering while hiking up to a sovereign Hawaiian village, like two people who have known each other for a while. Or at least two people who know enough about one another to try and get to know more. Yet by the timeline of the story, they basically just met. The scenes don’t feel earned, because the characters haven’t believably built up to that point. It’s like one-third of the movie was skipped over.
While that’s going on, there’s also the subplot of Gilcrest seeing his former girlfriend, Tracy (McAdams), who’s now married with two kids. Gilcrest’s return to Hawaii presumably opens up old wounds and unresolved issues with his ex, something that Tracy’s husband, Woody (Krasinski), quickly picks up on. But do Gilcrest and Woody kind of already know each other, as seems to be implied early in the movie? If so, the story never elaborates on that.
And is the relationship between Gilcrest and Tracy a subplot, or should it be the main plot of the film? Or did Crowe eventually realize that people probably wouldn’t go for the protagonist trying to steal his ex-girlfriend away from her husband and children because it would make him an asshole? Or was the intention to pursue the romance between Gilcrist and Ng, yet Crowe still wanted to explore the story of facing a former love who’s clearly moved on?
Meanwhile, the plotline that’s presumably driving the story is Gilcrist needing to get the blessing of that sovereign Hawaiian nation to clear a pedestrian bridge that will allow the U.S. military and the company for whom he’s now a contractor to move equipment in and build a satellite outpost. At least I think that’s what was going on.
Most everyone believes that this is steamrolling the native people and opening the door to more sinister, self-serving motives — such as building weapons — from the company’s CEO, Carson Welch (Murray). That is, except the military, who is all too willing to accept Welch’s money, and Gilcrest, who needs to redeem his career after botching an operation in Kabul and apparently suffered major injury to his leg in an explosion there.
Does all of this not sound like something from an entirely different movie? All of the confusion is right there on the screen.
If you’re not completely frustrated by how scattershot and patchy the story is, you might eventually find yourself rooting for it to succeed because Cooper and Stone are so appealing. Actually, Cooper’s character seems like kind of a jerk who doesn’t necessarily deserve the happiness that seems to be right there in front of him.
Stone is the best part of the film. Even though the movie is a mess, it somehow works whenever she’s on screen because she’s so much fun and her character seems to be the only one that’s fully defined. It’s curious that Stone was chosen to play a woman who’s supposed to be part-Asian and part-Hawaiian. I guess Olivia Munn wasn’t considered a big enough name for the role.
But really, if you have a chance to put Stone in your movie, you should probably do that. So who could blame Crowe or Sony for casting her — even if she doesn’t really look like the person she’s supposed to be playing. Initially, Ng is an earnest go-getter type — to the point that she comes off as kind of a cartoon character — with a promising career in front of her.
Yet as pieces of her backstory are revealed and she opens herself up as a character, Stone makes Ng compelling enough that it’s at least worth following her through the rest of this mess. Still, you can’t help but wonder why she’s interested in Gilcrest, other than he looks like Bradley Cooper.
As I mentioned earlier, there are several parts of Aloha that work, which is probably the biggest reason it’s so frustrating to watch. Stone is obviously one of those parts that work. Krasinski’s character does too. His unwillingness to talk about his military work is mostly played for laughs, but Crowe hit on something about the silences and unspoken understandings between men that made Woody’s scenes with Gilcrest poignant.
Cooper also works, of course, even though the character he plays and his motivations never really make sense. But there’s a beautiful scene at the end of the movie that basically salvages Gilcrest’s character arc. It almost makes the movie worthwhile. It’s just too bad that Crowe didn’t focus more on that storyline, or maybe build the movie around that scene.
There probably is a good movie somewhere in Aloha. But Crowe apparently couldn’t figure out what the best story was or had too many ideas that he wasn’t willing to give up on, and instead tried to cram them all into the same film. The hope among Crowe fans is that some deleted scenes could be restored to a director’s cut and help make a better movie. But I doubt that’s possible, even if Crowe tries. There are just too many disparate storylines.
It’s disappointing to consider that Crowe hasn’t made a good movie since Almost Famous 15 years ago (though I will defend Vanilla Sky). It feels like he’s suffering from a conflict as a writer between going with the familiar formula that brought him success and trying to take a chance that could revitalize him creatively. But after botching Aloha so badly, you wonder how many studios will give him another opportunity to figure out where to go next.