Cinemazlowski 'Aloha' is filled with heart and humor

May 29, 2015

There was a time when it was enough for a filmmaker to make a great movie, and nothing else mattered. There were writers and directors whose name on a poster signified that viewers were in for a treat, whether they were seeing a movie by Preston Sturges or John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock or Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese.

For just over a decade, Cameron Crowe was among those greats, with classics like “Say Anything,” “Jerry Maguire” and his tour de force, “Almost Famous,” all coming between 1989 and 2000. But then he fell from grace, and fell hard, with a disastrous 2005 movie called “Elizabethtown,” a highly personal tribute to his then-recently deceased father that was such a bomb it  derailed both his own career and the careers of its stars, Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom.

Fast forward to this weekend, when Crowe’s new movie “Aloha” hits theatres with a cast that’s almost too good to be true. Bradley Cooper, fresh off the $500 million worldwide smash “American Sniper,” is the head of an ensemble that includes Rachel McAdams, Emma Stone, Bill Murray, Alec Baldwin, Danny McBride and John Krasinski of “The Office” – and yet, the movie has garnered near-poisonous advance word of mouth, largely because industry insiders are criticizing its marketing campaign.

The good news for viewers is, this is a great movie, filled with all the hallmarks that make Crowe one of our most vital filmmakers: vibrant performances, memorable dialogue and situations that truly wrap viewers into moral dilemmas that are comic and heartbreaking all at once. The bad news for Sony, which has to market it, is that this is a movie that can’t be defined and dumbed-down in a sentence, like “Hot Pursuit” and “Mad Max,” “Pitch Perfect 2” and the upcoming “Spy,” and the resulting billboards and posters are more confusing than enlightening about its plot. 

“Aloha” follows Cooper as Brian Gilcrest, a former military contractor who was gravely injured in Afghanistan while conducting a business mission for an eccentric billionaire named Carson Welch (Bill Murray). Forced to abandon his lifelong dreams of being an astronaut by a combination of his injuries and the government cutbacks that de-funded NASA, he’s flying back to his boyhood home of Hawaii with an unusual assignment from both the military and Welch: to convince the leader of a native Hawaiian resistance group to give his literal and figurative blessing to a new bridge between two US bases.

While he’s there for the five days of his mission, Gilcrest finds himself torn between two women – a very serious ex-girlfriend named Tracy from 13 years ago (McAdams) and a pilot named Alison Ng (Stone), who has volunteered to be his military escort throughout his stay. At first, Alison seems overbearing and annoying, while the now-married Tracy has the forbidden allure of an exotic past lover.  And as he navigates his way between the two women, Gilcrest is also having to wrestle with his conscience as he learns what his prayer-seeking mission is really about.

Since this is a Cameron Crowe movie, all of this is more unique and involving than a basic plot description could ever convey. This is the writer who coined all-time catch phrases like “Show me the money!” and “You complete me” in “Jerry Maguire,” brought us the iconic image of John Cusack holding a boombox over his head to express undying love in “Say Anything,” and refashioned Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” into an anthem of youthful rock n’roll freedom in “Almost Famous.”

On top of it all, “Aloha” is one of the most moral movies to come out of the Hollywood mainstream in a long time. It’s rated PG13 but I honestly couldn’t see why, by the usual standards of the rating. There are no F words, literally a couple of milder swear words, no violence, no onscreen sex (two unmarried characters are shown lying in bed together talking after implied sex, however), and everyone winds up doing the right thing. It won’t appeal to young kids, and likely not teenagers, but for adults, it’s a rare film that respects both your intelligence and your conscience.
“Aloha” may be hard to describe in a sentence or two, or those sentences may not grab a prospective filmgoer’s attention as an easily defined genre piece. But it is filled with heart and humor, breathtaking moments of romance and heartbreaking moments of choices between right and wrong that are universally relatable and eminently lovable.

In other words, it’s not prefabricated garbage from the Hollywood assembly line, but rather a film that is memorable enough to stand the test of time. It’s the kind of movie that people will look back on someday and wish they’d given a chance to the first time around in theaters. Here’s your chance, don’t blow it.