Crowe: Aloha (2015)

By this point, the American Dream has all but become a dead metaphor, equally applicable or irrelevant to any number of American movies, depending on your perspective. Yet Cameron Crowe is one of the few directors who could be said to still truly have a living investment in the idea of the Dream – ever since Jerry Maguire, his films have focused in on characters who find their aspirational mobility thwarted, often in the workplace, and have to find some alternative pursuit of happiness, some other avenue for making themselves over in the nation’s image. As a result, his films often have a homecoming flavour even or especially when his characters have no real home to return to any more, since his vision is more about recovering and restoring the increasingly transient sense of homeland itself, if only for the couple of hours that you’re immersed in his films. In that sense, his films often feel like experiments in crafting a deeply, personally – and above all, liberally – patriotic affect in the face of a nation that has less and less time for precisely that brand of patriotism, which was so suited to the centrist, Clintonesque climate of mid-90s America but feels as remote as Frank Capra by now. On the one hand, that means Crowe’s various American Dreams have become ever more contorted and contrived since Jerry Maguire, but it’s also forced him to transform those contrivances into a veritable artistic signature – a will to imagine something more than the cynicism or pessimism of more realist visions. And in some ways, Aloha is the degree zero of that conscious contrivance, that will to generosity, which is perhaps why it also feels like Crowe’s definitive break with realism. Once again, we’re faced with a homecoming narrative, although it’s perhaps significant that this is the first of Crowe’s films to be set outside the mainland United States, with the action unfolding on Hawaii and, more generally, across the night sky, which is painted as a kind of deterretorialised, glorified firmament of what the United States might have been and still is in Crowe’s cinematic world. Into that landscape comes Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper), a military technician-turned-contractor who returns to Hawaii after a stint in Afghanistan. Among a ensemble cast that includes his ex-wife (Rachel McAdams), her husband (John Kraskinski), his ex-boss (Danny McBride), his new boss (Bill Murray) and his Air Force liaison (Emma Stone), Gilcrest has to reckon with his current mission: to help launch a private military satellite into orbit that may start another global arms race and dispense with the atmosphere’s exemption from property rights forever. As might be expected, that leads to lots of sky- and stargazing, but the film as a whole is centred around fleeting gazes as never before in Crowe’s oeuvre, glances that seem to say hello and goodbye at once, and intricate, delicate dances of bodies and faces that make Crowe feel more like a choreographer than a director, as if trying to evoke the ebullient spirit of patriotism gesturally, in the spontaneous communions that pass from American to American in the midst of collective celebrations or ceremonies. As a result, the most memorable scenes tend to be crowd scenes, while even the one-on-one encounters have the slightly incidental, irrelevant, atonal quality that works best when masked or cushioned by the presence of other bodies – every conversation feels a little too flat, or a little too audible - to the point where the dialogue detracts from virtually ever encounter, contriving a patriotism that now only really exists as a lingering, inchoate affect into pronouncements that feel utterly incommensurate to what’s taking place. It’s no coincidence, then, that Krasinski’s character never talks, or that his wordless encounter with Gilcrest prompts the most crucial in a long line of wordless revelations, since it’s clear that Crowe’s love for country has forced him into something like silent cinema, a disconnection between sound and image, speech and feeling, that might not particularly look like an elegy, but always feels like one, saying goodbye when it most appears to be greeting you and subsuming itself into Crowe's immaculately curated soundtrack as never before.