I was not planning on seeing Aloha, Cameron Crowe‘s latest film, but it’s getting some interesting scrutiny in the media.
First off, let me just say that Crowe’s Almost Famous is a modern classic, and Say Anything… is, at a bare minimum, a classic of its era (and probably also a modern classic). Singles will always be one of my favorite films (“I read half of Exodus!”) I’m not as enamored of Jerry Maguire as some, but it remains highly quotable.
Vanilla Sky did something truly astounding, though. It was a remake of a Spanish film, Abre los Ojos, that I thoroughly enjoyed. Crowe’s remake managed to be very faithful to the original (including casting Penelope Cruz in the same role), while also completely failing to capture whatever it was that made that movie good. I should also note that I saw Vanilla Sky in the theater, thought it was pond scum, then rented Abre los Ojos and thought it was great. The order of viewing may have influenced my opinion of the Spanish film.
I have not seen Elizabethtown or We Bought a Zoo, nor do I foresee doing so in the future.
Much of the media coverage of Aloha seems to recognize the relative slump in Crowe’s career. His most recent films haven’t done all that well in theaters, and perhaps more importantly (if you look at the “art” side of things), they just haven’t been as good as his earlier works. (Maybe that’s why there are rumors that he’s trying to go back to the beginning.)
More interesting, at least to me, are the many cultural issues that Crowe waded into with Aloha, by setting the film in Hawaii. Remember, Hawaii was an independent country until the late 19th century. The United States recognized it as such in 1844, but in 1893, a coup led largely by U.S. citizens overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani and the monarchy. It was an independent republic for a few years, led by people born in Hawaii but descended from European settlers, until the United States annexed it in 1898. Most of the territory (except for the Johnston Atoll and some other islands) became the State of Hawaii in 1959. On the 100th anniversary of the 1893 coup, Congress passed a joint resolution apologizing for the U.S. role in overthrowing the Kingdom of Hawaii.
Culturally, Hawaii is part of Polynesia, but today less than 0.1% of people in the State of Hawaii are native speakers of the Hawaiian language. Unlike many other indigenous peoples in the United States, native Hawaiians do not have their own sovereign organizations like the Indian tribal organizations, although native Hawaiian organizations have some similar rights with regard to the federal government. My point in all this, seeing as how I have diverged from my original topic of Cameron Crowe movies, is that Hawaii is a complicated place, especially if you are going to make a movie there that is all about white people.
Hawaiian police uniforms have gotten decidedly less cool in the last 200 years.
That brings me to Aloha, which apparently does not handle Hawaiian history and culture with quite such attentiveness. Other critics have argued that the cultural disconnects between Bradley Cooper’s character and the film’s Hawaiian setting are part of the purpose of the film, but that’s a difficult road for any film to travel.
The main point of discourse about the film, however, seems to be the casting of wide-eyed, blonde and/or redhead actress Emma Stone as Allison Ng (h/t Leng):
As you may know, Emma Stone plays a character named “Allison Ng” in the new Cameron Crowe movie Aloha. Her character, who’s supposed to be a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese, is meaningfully non-white within the framework of the story; according to Entertainment Weekly, she’s a “Hula dancing expert with a functional knowledge of Hawaiian folk guitar who rhapsodizes about the islander spiritual energy mana when she isn’t attempting to save the archipelago from a creeping military-industrial complex.”
Isn’t it so cool when a former white savior character gets to show her range by being a mystically exotic non-white savior character too?
Before we get any further, let’s recap some facts about Hawaii, natively known as Hawai’i:
- It’s an archipelago
- settled by Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders
- whose destruction at the hands of white people began in the late eighteenth century, when Captain Cook’s crew decimated the native population with tuberculosis and STDs
- whose native monarchy was later overthrown at gunpoint by the British in 1843
which was later illegally annexed by the United States with the help of the economically oppressive white minority- which remains U.S. territory despite the fact that Bill Clinton signed a resolution in 1993 “apologizing” to the Native Hawaiians for the “deprivation of their rights to self-determination”
- in which white people remain a decided minority at around 25 percent.
Now, let’s recap some facts about Aloha, which was also originally called Hawaii:
- It’s a movie
- directed by a white man
- about Hawaii
- called Aloha
- starring a 100 percent white cast
- in which one of these white cast members plays a woman named “Allison Ng.”
Stone’s character is described as “one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter Hawaiian, and half Swedish.” Maybe they figured the overpowering blondeness of Allison’s Swedish genes* would justify the casting decision**.
The whole thing reminds me of a scene in the underrated Denis Leary movie The Ref, which gave me the title of this post. He plays a burglar named Gus who has to take an annoying yuppie couple (which includes Kevin Spacey) hostage, and hijinks ensure. This occurs at Christmas, so of course the annoying yuppie couple’s annoying family is coming over, and Denis Leary has to pretend to be their marriage counselor, Dr. Wong. The annoying mother-of-Spacey character is skeptical:
Rose: You’re a “Wong”?
Gus: Well, my mother was Irish.
Rose: And your father?
Gus: Wasn’t.
You have to read Gus’ lines in Denis Leary’s voice. The real Dr. Wong, by the way, only appears in one scene, played by BD Wong.
It seems as though there’s a great deal more to digest here. I think Emma Stone is a great actress who deserves the accolades she has received. It is not intended as a slam against her to say that this might not have been the best casting decision.
UPDATE (06/02/2015): It is also rumored that Cameron Crowe cast another white woman in the role of an Asian character in his next movie.
UPDATE 2 (06/03/2015): Crowe now says he’s sorry, sort of.
* Full disclosure: I am not a doctor, or geneticist, or any other sort of science-talkin’ guy.
** Fuller disclosure: I assumed that “Ng” was a Vietnamese name, based on the tiny amount I know about Asian names and languages, but I was wrong. It’s a variant of a name originating in Wu Chinese, spoken in the Shanghai region.
Photo credits: Sodacan, this vector image was created with Inkscape (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons; Jacques Arago [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; GIFs from Popsugar, Rebloggy, and HelloGiggles.
