There are a few moments in “Aloha” – all of them having to do with the senses and certainly not the brain or heart – that bring fleeting sensations of wonder, or at least of curiosity, to the eye and ear.
The headlights of an SUV in the night reflect obviously off of the lens of the camera for quite a while in the sort of way that feels intentional. The messiness of the perspectives in the opening sequence feels meaningfully off-putting. The consistent over-saturation of sound, layering upon layering of ukulele under Elvis under crickets in the night under rain in the palm trees under Bill Murray speaking platitudes of no apparent relevance under something being spoken (seemingly in the background?) about weapon payloads aboard Bill Murray’s private satellite being launched offshore gives the impression that this romantic comedy might be just about to turn into something interesting. So you wait.
But then Aloha ends, and you realize the confusion that is paramount when watching it is just that, and your inability to follow even a remote strand of narrative that makes sense has nothing to do with anything except bad filmmaking. Usually, it’s difficult to point to which exact piece of the process – the script, the script’s interpretation and direction, or the editing – ruined a movie. I can honestly say that Aloha’s total incoherence seems to be a combination of multiple train wrecks occurring at every step of the process. (Crowe wrote and directed) The dialogue is the least sensible I’ve heard in any film from recent memory. No one speaks in real sentences, or to real people, at all; if there weren’t shots containing multiple human beings, I’d be convinced everyone was flown out to film in isolation and told to deliver this fascinatingly poor combination of typical Rom-Com clichés and what I guess must be Cameron Crowe’s concept of philosophical philandering to pictures of The King mounted to tiki torches instead of to other actors.
Somehow, the strength of the cast makes the flaws in the story even more apparent: Stone and Cooper, talented leads, cannot for the life of them make the characters in this story in any way consistent (isn’t that what necessitates a character?). Every single scene contains completely different people with the exact same faces, pretty as those faces are. I should share that one brief moment had me getting emotional. It was thanks to the strength of Cooper, and the young girl that plays his daughter, and the blessing that in this scene there was no written dialogue: just looks between people who should have been in a better movie.
In fact, an hour and fifty-five minutes in, I was crossing every appendage I own that Bradley Cooper was going to wake up and have it all be a dream. That way at least the odd sermonizing and repeated motifs throughout would have perhaps been rendered interpretable to have meaning in some larger context, outside of this random meandering. As it is, toward the end of the film we just find the characters descending (or ascending?) to become what they need to be for the dime-a-dozen rom-com to rap up. Because I guess this was intentioned to be a rom-com.
Though I’m sure it’s not apparent, I am reluctant to condemn this film. It’s not harmful, just abhorrently made, and I did thoroughly enjoy two or three moments where everyone shut up and I was allowed to sink into the work of Eric Gautier, who was in charge of the cinematography (He also shot 2007’s Into the Wild.) He is the one who is responsible for my hope throughout the two-hour running time. His images overlaying this orchestration of Hawaiian sounds, which I assume were thrown in to let the movie coast on emotion and/or brightness when it was made clear the story didn’t make any sense, were what I wanted to watch.
Sadly, Crowe, who once upon a time gave us Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire, managed to turn everything he touched in this film into a glittering nothingness. Hello, and goodbye.
The film is now playing.
-Nick Vincennes
