Career injection
Cameron Crowe | With audiences saying goodbye to Aloha, can the former king of cool get his groove back?
Cameron Crowe made Jerry Maguire. Will he ever show us the money again?
Sometimes life imitates art, sometimes art imitates life. Sometimes, art and life decamp to opposite coasts. Having made a career out of films about lost dudes given a second shot at life by a woman’s love, Cameron Crowe needs a second shot. Thing is, the remedy might be tougher to find.
Crowe’s latest redemptive romance opened in America alongside The Rock’s San Andreas. One was a disaster movie, the other disastrous. Its rep cracked pre-release with whispered criticisms of the script emerging online, Aloha was pasted in reviews and pasted again for its casting of Emma Stone in a part-Hawaiian role. Plus, audiences did not show Crowe the money. $24m BO? Goodbye, Aloha.
The plummet looks precipitous for a respected director with a crack cast (Stone, Bradley Cooper, Bill Murray, Rachel McAdams…) on safe turf, but it looks worse after Crowe’s decade-plus decline. And it all started so well. Crowe had us at “hello” with his directing debut, Say Anything…, a heart-first teen romance rooted in strong characters and peppery dialogue. Sketchy proto-grunge romance Singles couldn’t slow him down: despite some doubters (“meretricious, manipulative and reactionary,” spat Time Out), Tom Cruise-powered corporate fairy-tale Jerry Maguire secured Crowe’s rep for cute, character-driven crowd-pleasers. But how do you follow the hit everyone’s quoting? Sweetly sanitised rock memoir Almost Famous pleased critics but audiences lacked the teeth for it: box-office takings dragged. Crowe responded with a risk in the twisty Vanilla Sky but struggled to tease a coherent whole from some impressive set-pieces – and he’s still struggling. He spent four years making 2005’s Elizabethtown, which looked like four years’ worth of contrived, crowd-pleasing moments crammed into a Maguire reheat. Seven years and two rock-docs later, We Bought A Zoo added little else fresh to his formula.
One defender has risen: Google “Alex Ross Perry Aloha” for the Listen Up Philip helmer’s smartly hearty fan letter. Perry calls Aloha “lesser Crowe” but mounts a strong case for irony-free, mid-budget antidotes to superheroes busting blocks. A belief in sincere, character-led, mid-priced storytelling is admirable, in principle. And TV could be a canny place to test it: Crowe is making road-crew ensemble piece Roadies for Showtime. Let’s hope redemption lies down that highway. KH