Aloha Oy

Set in Hawaii, Cameron Crowe’s Aloha uses President Obama’s home state as if returning to paradise — a paradise lost. Designed to appease devout anti-“birthers,” it uses Hawaii like Bethlehem, but a Bethlehem overrun by corporate and military developers; they descend upon the Pacific neglectful of Pearl Harbor but as opportunistic as those fracking bullies in Matt Damon’s Promised Land. These untrustworthy government and big-industry interlopers befoul the islands with covert plans to launch a satellite — Project Brave Angel — that will secure global communications dominance for the United States.

The job of selling that mission to the locals is assigned to former contractor Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper), who, after being wounded in Afghanistan, has “gone over to the gray side,” employed by a cynical media tycoon (Bill Murray) as liaison for the Army. Aloha remakes the conventional service comedy for a cynical age — a Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys, that’s careful to respect derisive, flag-burning attitudes. (By contrast, in the new French film Love at First Fight, the military promises “You enlist. We commit.”) Crowe, who directed Jerry Maguire, polished his slickness long before the 2008 election and is going for another crowd-pleaser. Aloha’s Adam-and-two-Eves plot, with its blended-family, anti-authority pandering, would embarrass the craftiest politician.

Brian might have offered a redemption story for a filmmaker honestly interested in exploring disillusionment, the sorrowful ways Americans’ millennial ambitions contradict Obama’s exotic legacy. But instead of exploring Hawaii as a crucible of modern American values, where ethnicity and heritage mix with military agendas, Crowe exploits collective chagrin, typical liberal self-pity, and mild military-shaming.

RELATED: Hawaiians Offended That a Movie Is Named Aloha

Aloha never develops a coherent post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan fairy tale. It can’t just be about how Brian makes amends for his mercenary war years; it’s also mawkish: Brian rivals Army pilot John Woodside (John Krasinski), who married Brian’s former lover Tracy (Rachel McAdams). It’s also maudlin: Assisted by flirty, one-quarter-Hawaiian soldier Allison Ng (Emma Stone), Brian swindles native Hawaiians in order to get the space he needs to build the satellite launch site, thus repeating the white man’s original sin of Manifest Destiny.

But don’t worry; it’s a Cameron Crowe film, pledged to a style of Hollywood prevarication that makes some viewers feel they are on some hip wavelength. As in his atrocious Singles, Vanilla Sky, Almost Famous, and We Bought a Zoo, and the utterly dishonest Jerry Maguire, every phony character is super-cute, so that the superficial moral dilemmas — and their specious political implications — are as disingenuous and deceitful as a politician’s grin.

It’s disappointing to see Bradley Cooper go from the career high of his two previous performances in American Hustle and American Sniper, where he represented opposing styles of authentic American experience: farcical and tragic, petty and heroic. Brian Gilcrest is a slimy conceit calculated to elicit pity, admiration, disdain, then romantic gushing. Ng describes him as a “brilliant, compelling, innovative, commanding, sad wreck of a guy,” then almost immediately sleeps with him.

This makes Crowe as two-faced as Clint Eastwood, who shrewdly played on contrasting war attitudes in American Sniper — a con job that worked because of Cooper’s uncanny, intense authenticity. Here, Cooper is as smiley-smarmy as he was in Wedding Crashers, which suits Crowe’s implicit anti-military derision. “I need you to believe in me,” Cooper implores. And when Ng declares, “I’m deeply moved,” Stone is deeply unconvincing.

Crowe doesn’t dig into divided patriotism as Eastwood did; he’s still that “irreverent” Rolling Stone magazine wunderkind who knows what side pays best. But now he’s in tune with that publication’s current irrelevance and political bias. Aloha’s Hawaii-stationed brass (played by Danny McBride and Alec Baldwin) are post-draft, post-Vietnam stooges. Unlike Cooper’s Chris Kyle in American Sniper, they’re non-macho, without patriotic commitment, and they are dutiful without principle. They’re the Jerry Maguire sports-agents crew: Cuckolded pilot Woodside is an inarticulate automaton, and the others are eager to sell out, even selling out the American people — especially the brown-skinned islanders (a quickly dismissed subplot).

Question: Is Crowe more patronizing when he parades a chesty, noble-faced Third World patriarch (Dennis Kanahele, the actual leader of the Nation of Hawai’i group), who wears a T-shirt that reads “Hawaiian By Birth” in front and “American By Force” in back? Or when he has the dimply McAdams dithering about marital fidelity and her two children’s heredity. It’s clear that Crowe is as insincere about ethnic heritage as he is about patrimony.

These too-hip attitudes culminate in a showdown after Brian has mocked Woodside (“Who wants to be replaced by a comic version of himself?”). Suddenly, Woodside loses his laconic menace, and the two men become simpatico. Crowe stages their wordless exchange as a stunt — a good one, but a stunt nonetheless. It’s as manipulative as Brian saving his “soul” the way a 20th-century campus anarchist would, using counterculture totems (Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” David Bowie, and the MTV jingle among other tired signifiers).

#related#Crowe never clarifies the backstory of Brian’s sell-out in Kabul (David O. Russell was more honest in Three Kings); rather, Crowe stages sick-joke pillow talk, in which Brian tells Allison about his post-op deformity: two big toes on one foot (“That’s the entire Middle East conflict right there”). Incapable of credible introspection, Crowe has his characters become accusatory in the cheap manner of partisan politics and liberal sanctimony: Bill Murray’s media magnate, Carson Welch, commits the sin of Americanism, bragging that “We’re doing things this country was built to do.” The sophomoric Crowe pretends that Americans hate the rich (unless they’re Steve Jobs or Jann Wenner).

Aloha’s combination of cynicism, calculation, and sucking-up fails the need to resolve Obama America’s Iraq-Afghanistan malaise (that’s what American Sniper moved toward). Crowe’s literally lame hero with his patchwork-quilt family, nonexistent sense of community, and anxious love life is of a piece with the stultified white middle-class Hawaiians of Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. (Through similar smugness, Crowe makes Ng as white-acceptable as possible.)

Falsifying America’s post-war stress, Crowe uses the satirical formula he has over-admired in the cynical films of Billy Wilder — an unfortunate role model, but that’s all a fatuous filmmaker’s got. (Crowe doesn’t even have Wilder’s immigrant gratitude or the conviction of Wilder’s post–World War II ambivalence in A Foreign Affair or One, Two, Three.) Hiring French maestro Eric Gautier as cinematographer, seeking the diffused realism of Olivier Assayas’s films, was also a mistake; this Hawaii doesn’t look like paradise. Crowe proves as distant from his subject as Assayas, but without the stylized coolness.

If you take Bradley Cooper as a reference point, and get past the sentimental Obama camouflage, Aloha looks insensitively detached from postwar discontent. Crowe’s phony emotions — concocting the most shamelessly sentimental movie ending so far this year — corrupts catharsis, the essential need that the liberal media objected to in American Sniper. Aloha fakes catharsis for leftist cynics.

* * *

Love at First Fight, by Thomas Cailley, is the first French military film I’ve seen that’s not about war. Instead, it gives a picture of modern France — its economic and political collapse, and the emotional confusion of its young people. Madeleine (Adèle Hanael) and Arnaud (Kévin Azais) enlist for training in the army (the nation’s Number Two recruiter; McDonald’s is Number One). It’s a romantic service comedy about a tough gal and a sensitive guy trying to figure out who they are in a culture where military and civilian roles have been as destabilized as sex roles. It’s beautiful, funny, and insightful — and without the snideness that infects Aloha. The military is realistically appreciated as the ultimate means of cultural survival. That makes Love at First Fight both pro-life and an anti-ISIS recruiting film. Cailley salutes the natural gifts women and men can contribute to their country and to each other.