In the romantic comedies of Cameron Crowe, and perhaps only in the romantic comedies of Cameron Crowe, the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen are also the most hopeless, loveless and clueless.
They are wayward neurotics who nonetheless possess perfect bodies, ineffable charm and a writerly wit. His films are set in a world we recognize, but the glamorous screw-ups that inhabit it are products of wish-fulfillment fantasy, as real as the CGI SFX in a blow-em-up blockbuster.
When his formula misfires completely, the result is insufferably twee to the point of unwatchable (the notorious Elizabethtown). Yet, with inspired writing, pitch-perfect acting and warm direction, Crowe can hoodwink us enough to buy his entire universe hook, line and sinker (Jerry Maguire). Both of these tendencies show up in the wildly uneven Aloha, which will enthuse Crowe’s base but fail to move his detractors.
A stupidly engaging, gently suggestive cautionary tale about post-NASA space travel, Aloha is set, naturally, in Hawaii, where Space Age dreamer turned jaded military contractor Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) has lent his services to Carson Welch (Bill Murray), an eccentric billionaire interested in private space missions. Brian has been assigned to convince a Hawaiian micronation to allow Welch’s satellite to position itself over their land — a device that may be or may not be loaded with nuclear weapons.
His chaperone on the island, a young “one-quarter-Hawaiian” Air Force pilot named Allison Ng (Emma Stone), is positioned immediately as his love interest, leaving these capable actors with the yeomen’s duty of postponing the inevitable, knowing full well the audience will always be one step ahead of their characters. Thus, Cooper and Stone ably engage in the rom-com theater of opposites clashing among the exoticized kitsch of ukulele music and tiki libations: he the disillusioned cynic with an impenetrable heart, she the spunky, starry-eyed spiritualist.
Brian may be a tortured brooder, but his island journey ain’t all bad; when Emma Stone isn’t nipping at his heels, he’s spending time with Rachel McAdams, playing his ex-girlfriend Tracy Woodside, now married to a distant, taciturn pilot (John Krasinski). There is much unpackaged baggage from their now 13-year-old relationship, including Tracy’s 12-year-old daughter; you don’t need to be psychic to guess the “big news” Tracy had in store for Brian on the eve of their dissolution.
Like many military-set comedies of the wartime 1940s, Aloha is a costume piece more than a reflection on combat. There’s lots of formal saluting in full regalia, but there’s never a sense that danger might intrude on the budding romance. After his intense embodiment of American sniper Chris Kyle, it’s even a little disconcerting to watch Cooper’s blazing blue eyes sink so calmly into the sockets of a typically pensive, sensitive and funny Crowe protagonist.
What the film does offer is some zeitgeisty subtext on the future of space exploration in the time of a defunded NASA, a Wild West era of aging magnates firing rockets into the air like penis extensions. This element inspires some of Crowe’s strongest writing in the film, assisted by a scene-stealing Murray and by Alec Baldwin as a hotheaded general.
Ultimately, though, Crowe is a shallow romantic and a slave to classicist formula. Some of his old inspiration does resurface among the shopworn detritus, particularly a pair of wordless “conversations” between Cooper and Krasinski, sold hilariously by the actors’ body language.
But the story’s central, protracted coupling-and-decoupling is peppered with cloying one-liners pitifully angling to be the next “you complete me” or “you had me at hello,” until hearts align and character flaws are sufficiently smoothed out. For Crowe, space isn’t a final frontier; it’s a plot point en route to a movie you’ve seen before.
ALOHA. Director: Cameron Crowe; Cast: Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray, John Krasinski, Danny McBride, Alec Baldwin; Distributor: Columbia; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Today at most area theaters