You Lost Me At ‘Aloha’: Cameron Crowe’s Fatal White Dude Problem

This is a review of Aloha. Spoiler alert.

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I don’t want to say Cameron Crowe is finished as a director. After all, white dudes are frequently given chance after chance to emerge from career slumps, unlike female directors, directors of colour and queer directors who can have their careers crippled by one box office failure.

But Crowe’s new Hawaii-set romantic dramedy Aloha plumbs the rock bottom of his trademark folksy white-dude angst. “It’s not too late for you to become a person of substance, Russell,” said Elaine (Frances McDormand) in Crowe’s Almost Famous; but is it too late for Cameron?

From Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) in Say Anything to Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) in We Bought A Zoo, Crowe’s films follow prematurely jaded straight white men as they rediscover their sense of purpose by making impulsive life decisions, inspired by the love of young, free-spirited women. Indeed, Elizabethtown was the film that led critic Nathan Rabin to coin the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. (And Rabin’s review of Aloha is basically, “I can’t believe he tried this shit again.”)

Aloha’s protagonist Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) is a pilot, an astrophysicist or an arms dealer – I was never sure. Anyway, he’s disgraced, and almost died in Afghanistan. But now he’s been given a second chance as a private aerospace contractor for eccentric billionaire Carson Welch (Bill Murray). This somehow involves travelling to Hawaii as a middleman to negotiate between his old military mate, Colonel ‘Fingers’ Lacey (Danny McBride), and Hawaiian sovereignty activist Dennis ‘Bumpy’ Kanahele (playing himself), chaperoned by young fighter pilot Allison Ng (Emma Stone).

The plot is a mess. Rather than a story with coherent themes and relationships, it’s a collection of pointless character quirks running around in search of McGuffins. It loudly claims to reveal profound truths about humility, love, world peace and Hawaiian mysticism, but mostly ends up saying, “I’m Cameron Crowe and I’m all out of ideas.”

Having His White Bread And Eating It Too

Bad buzz has been encircling Aloha like a swarm of angry hornets. In development since at least 2008, its release has been delayed and delayed; as late as February it was still being called Untitled Cameron Crowe Project/Hawaii, which itself is a vast improvement on the original title, Deep Tiki. Critics were held to a review embargo, but the infamous Sony email hack revealed a damning review poem from then-studio boss Amy Pascal: “It never/not even once/ever works”.

But what’s really been rustling people’s jimmies is the film’s predominantly white cast — especially Emma Stone’s character, who’s described as half-Swedish, a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese. According to the 2010 US census, white people make up 26.6% of Hawaiian residents, compared to 77.7% in America more broadly. The state has large populations of Asian (37.7%) and multiracial (23.1%) residents, while 10 per cent are Hawaiian natives or Pacific Islanders.

But I think it’s important to separate Hollywood’s broader failure of racially diverse casting from Aloha’s specific pissweakness regarding Hawaiian people and traditions. Crowe claims to earnestly respect these. But his trademark combination of cynicism and whimsy – which critic Brian Doan dubs “the act of not having an act” – has produced a world in which cultural hybridity serves seriously white-bread narrative purposes.

Crowe’s Hawaii is both world-weary and wide-eyed. It’s a politically fraught space where billionaires and the US military jostle for space supremacy and request “blessings” for satellite launch sites from native activists wearing T-shirts that read “Hawaiian By Birth; American By Force”. But it’s also a place where Christmas decorations say ‘Mele Kalikimaka’, girls study hula like ballet, and white kids know local guitar songs and native mythology.

Hawaii also functions here as a signifier of magic and wonder. Aloha is fascinated by the idea of ‘mana’ – spiritual power – but only in the vague way of conventional romantic comedy tropes such as ‘destiny’ and ‘soulmates’. Skies darken, mysterious breezes blow, and at one point, Brian and Allison glimpse what Allison says are nightmarchers – ghosts of ancient Hawaiian warriors. But Crowe can’t commit to anything genuinely supernatural. Instead, the Hawaiian culture is there to facilitate cute bonding moments between white characters. It’s pretty lame.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Strikes Again

The activist complaints about Emma Stone’s casting are misdirected, as they treat her character as if she’s meant to be realistic. Instead, Allison’s racial identity is part of her Manic Pixie Dream Girl identity; Crowe has reduced the real issue of race to quirky window-dressing of a character whose sole purpose is to actualise the male protagonist. To explain his casting decision, Crowe has claimed the character of Allison is based on a real person, which is perhaps even more alarming because he actually seems to believe real women behave like the Manic Pixies of his oeuvre. And because she looks obviously white, her intense identification with her Hawaiian heritage is framed as a cute personality quirk, along with her military chirpiness and her sick dance moves.

More importantly, she wields her cultural knowledge in a Pixie-ish way: as a magical tool to bring people together. She charms Brian’s ex-girlfriend Tracy (Rachel McAdams) and Tracy’s kids Grace (Danielle Rose Russell) and Mitchell (Jaeden Lieberher) with her stories. And when Brian is sent to bargain for the native blessing, it’s Allison who saves the negotiations by charming Bumpy and the other native activists at a luau.

In real life, it’s absurd that a star pilot would be assigned to babysit a hopeless burnout. (“Stay away from our girl!” growls General Dixon (an excellent, under-used Alec Baldwin).) And Bradley Cooper doesn’t really offer much reason to believe Brian is worth falling for. But within the logic of this tiresome trope, of course the Manic Pixie heroine literally flies in to save the hero. No matter how failed and charmless he is. No matter how little it makes sense. Because the point of the story is his redemption – not their love, or her fulfilment.

Aloha almost redeemed itself for me late in the film, as Allison is sitting in the cockpit of her fighter jet. Earlier, Brian has explained to her that each of the stickers plastering his computer represents a mission – collectively, they symbolise key moments in his career. Now, Allison ceremoniously attaches a sticker from the motel where they stayed to her notebook.

It’s a neat way to show that Allison has moved on. She’s learned from Brian, but now he’s just a fond memory of a completed mission. But of course, Crowe can’t let a Manic Pixie Dream Girl have that kind of self-determination. She’s there to inspire the white dude… and so Allison and Brian must reunite.

I was even madder about the way the film treats Tracy. Having dumped the self-obsessed Brian for his pilot friend Woody (John Krasinski), who’s so strong and silent he’s basically a mime, she’s now having second thoughts. But the film makes it patronisingly clear that Woody is a stand-up guy, and Tracy’s insufficient Pixie-ness is the problem. She can’t intuit Woody’s thoughts and feelings, much less actualise his dreams. Instead, she wants – what? Companionship? A conversation? Out loud?

The grossest scene in the movie is a completely silent (but subtitled) body-language conversation between Brian and Woody, in which Woody expresses his anxiety that Brian might have had sex with his wife, and Brian reassures Woody that, no, he had sex with Allison instead.

Relieved, they hug ardently – because the happiness of white dudes is what really matters most to Cameron Crowe.

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Aloha hits Australian cinemas today.

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist and tweets at @incrediblemelk.