The recurring setting for director Cameron Crowe’s films is a warm and welcoming country where soulful men are saved by the affections of gorgeous women, and the jukebox plays time-tested hits from the rock and pop charts at appropriate moments. It’s fitting, then, that Crowe’s latest feature, Aloha, takes place in the laid-back American paradise of Hawaii, or at least a nostalgia-tinged movie version of the 50th state.
Following a long absence from the Islands and a near-fatal incident in Afghanistan, military and aerospace contractor Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) returns in the employ of a billionaire rocket entrepreneur (Bill Murray). For Gilcrest, it’s not just a homecoming but a reckoning with unsettled ghosts. Chief among these is his still-smarting breakup from former girlfriend Tracy (Rachel McAdams), now married with two kids, the eldest roughly as old as Gilcrest’s exile from Hawaii. (Uh-oh.) Complicating matters is Captain Allison Ng (Emma Stone), an exuberant Air Force liaison and fighter pilot who straightaway takes a shine to Gilcrest, his lone wolf act notwithstanding.
Aloha is a pleasant, nonthreatening sort of romantic dramedy, in that the film mostly coasts on genre conventions and the magnetism of its lead actors. The dramatic spotlight is occupied by Gilcrest’s attempts to belatedly disentangle himself from Tracy without sabotaging her marriage. However, he also struggles not to fumble a nascent relationship with Ng, a world-class woman fizzing with the Space Age optimism he’s abandoned. The presence of native Hawaiian activist Dennis “Bumpy” Kanehele as himself mitigates the film’s monochromatic depiction of island life, but Aloha is mostly a Pretty White People with Problems Movie. Unfortunately, it also possesses a hefty dose of the same third-act ridiculousness that consumed Crowe’s notorious original cut of Elizabethtown, which is a burden that no film should have to bear.
Aloha opens Thursday, May 28 at the Hi-Pointe Theatre, 1005 McCausland, 314-995-6273.
