By Michael Scoular (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: June 3, 2015
“I wanted to see your utopia … but now I see it is more of a fruitopia.”
— Stephen Hawking
Tomorrowland
Two seasons after animator and director Brad Bird left his work on The Simpsons to pursue a feature film career, “They Saved Lisa’s Brain” aired. In this episode, Mayor Quimby flees town, leaving Springfield in charge of the local Mensa group, into which Lisa has just been accepted (“Wow, me, fit in!”). Through their superior education, rational composure, and inherent brilliance, the group, which also includes Principal Skinner, Doctor Hibbert, Professor Frink, Lindsey Naegle, and the Comic Book Guy, believes that now, finally, with them in charge, their small, ignorant town will change. They will elevate the conversation. This is, of course, The Simpsons, so any hope for perfect governance is tempered by gentle cynicism: turns out everybody has their own ideas of utopia, which clash, devolving into an IQ-ranking in-fight. Then Stephen Hawking arrives. Next episode, the world will stay the same.
Tomorrowland’s Lisa Simpson, Casey Newton (other character names: Athena, Hugo Gernsback; George Clooney appears, unscathed, as Frank Walker), first appears off-screen, just her voice, arguing with Walker over who should tell the story. After a botched opening, she gets her turn, but this is a feint: Newton, played with as much spontaneity as the script allows by Britt Robertson, is not someone whose individuality overpowers the film, turning viewers to her perspective. Tomorrowland’s scope, and its folly, is much broader than that — like screenwriter Damon Lindelof’s previous work, particularly Lost, this is a story in which ideas are tested out, where characters exist to walk into traps or collide with immovable objects. Unlike those philosophical experiment episodes, this movie is also lashed together with Bird’s story, and with Disney’s; though it contemplates the narrative of the human universe, it never leaves where Bird begins, through Clooney’s opening:
“I got fired for, quote, rocking the boat, unquote. They were basically saying that if I’d stop complaining about quality, I could hold onto my job. I said, ‘I’m complaining about stuff your master animators taught me to complain about. So either I’m getting fired or I’m selling out everything you guys supposedly stand for.’”
That’s Bird recounting his firing from Disney as a young animator, years before his two acclaimed works with Pixar. It’s not a coincidence Clooney’s Frank Walker is similarly crushed, banished from utopia, separated from the inventing work he loves and continues to fill his home with. The opening of Tomorrowland illustrates that rise and downfall, and the rest of the film traces a circle around it, nudging toward a coming to terms with the regret of lost years and the creep of bitter, hardened adulthood, even as it is nominally an adventure yarn with parallel dimensions, robot police officers, and a comic goods shop loaded with Disney and Star Wars kitsch. So, okay, this is a personal film — and personal filmmaking is what we notice, sticking out from the remakes and franchises and fairytale repeats — but everything personal in this film is directed toward either touchy-feely didacticism or conspiracy-theory revisionist realism. Tomorrowland is most like a paranoid confessional album, where the artist simultaneously voices anxieties and tries to convince himself those anxieties have been released and dealt with: climate change will kill us all in 58 days! the end of space exploration is the death of imagination! dumbed-down school curriculum will bore and drain all our children’s curiousity! and worst of all, a young boy’s love will go unreturned!
To escape these dystopic fears, the film flashes back to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and sideways to the theme park city Disney built, a little aged, leaking promise like a long-vacated Olympic stadium project. Because this is a Brad Bird movie, there are a lot of glowing consoles, whirring action-figure robots who can’t reach their backs, and beeping explosives. Claudio Miranda, the cinematographer, casts everything in his typical antiseptic advertisement matte finish. But the real dream location of Tomorrowland is Los Angeles, where Walt himself dedicated a section of rides to “scientists today opening the doors of the Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come.” In a digital long-take glimpse, Casey takes in the glory: basically Los Angeles, but everyone and everything hovers. Scrambling to contact her parents to let them know she’s all right, she tells an answering machine, “I’m not on drugs, I haven’t joined a cult.” The rest of the movie suggests otherwise, beaming a message crossed between The Power of Positive Thinking and a let-us-join-hands Coca-Cola commercial.
Aloha
Late in Tomorrowland, Hugh Laurie’s space-aristocrat character delivers a monologue, summing up both his and, he assumes, his audience’s greatest modern fear: that time is slipping away. The damage we do will not be forgotten, and cannot be reversed. He speaks of the death of Earth, and ascribes it to our daily images: every morning, every nightly newscast, every trip to the theatre, we see destruction. In turn, we believe this calamity is inevitable, or that it is merely the stuff of entertainment, and do nothing.
This argument is larger than just one film; it drives a large amount of the discourse around all films when they are released across the world: are they true enough to reality, are they responsibly moral, do they provide us with both a problem and a solution to the personal and political scenarios they depict? While these questions are often an entry-point to urgent, necessary discussions, whether post-screening jokes or magazine essays, sometimes I wonder if they also sometimes suggest a desire for films to do the work of change for us: that they, prophetic works by Great Artists, turn the tide of whatever cause we stand beside. Bird’s and Lindelof’s scripts have this kind of entertainment-activism motivation behind them, and there is that tenor to the overwhelming criticism, some of it made before the film was even viewable, of Cameron Crowe’s Aloha.
Its problems are many: here is yet another movie set in a fictional, tourism-friendly Hawaii, one that erases the real experience of people there who live not at some vacation resort, but in cities and towns that almost never see the light of cinematic day. Emma Stone is cast as Allison Ng, a quarter-Hawaiian, quarter-Chinese, half-Swedish Air Force pilot, she proudly graphs, so this is also yet another insensitive, white-washed Hollywood fantasy. Bradley Cooper plays the protagonist, familiar to anyone who’s seen any other movie written by Crowe: the 30-something “brilliant, innovative, commanding, sad wreck of a guy,” disillusioned until he meets someone who believes in him. This, too, is a personal film by Crowe, made from a perspective that can imagine paradise, but lacks the empathy to truly reach beyond his own experience.
And yet, I can’t hate Aloha. Not in the way it is already being hated — I don’t think a complete dismissal accomplishes anything, and I think that even if Crowe somehow had avoided all these missteps, had made a diverse movie that truly reckoned with the effects of colonialism, went beyond, was an inclusive, inter-sectional movie about the politics and history of Hawaii while still also being a romantic melodrama, that audiences across the continent would not be better off — a fluke won’t change Hollywood’s way of doing things.
Aloha is a failure as a representation of a place. Most films are. Furious 7, held up as a way to “do things right” because of its multi-ethnic stars, traipses through Abu Dhabi and Azerbaijan with not a single word about the real people that live there, but perhaps that doesn’t matter, because it’s an action movie. Well, Aloha is a goofy romance, a sentimental throwback, and it’s flawed on many counts there too, but, perhaps owing to its whittled-down runtime (the studio, Columbia Pictures, hated it too: “People don’t like people in movies who flirt with married people or married people who flirt,” Amy Pascal wrote in a now-notorious email), and despite Crowe’s awful tendency for self-flattering redemption stories (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, both toxic, unfunny, and filled with annoying children), it has a way of finding emotionally dense, verbally disorienting moments of acting and pushing them to the forefront. And this works, even if these are the emotional currents of “white people.”
It’s not just Cooper’s character that’s admirable — everyone admires each other, storing away reflective pauses while saying far more than they mean to. It doesn’t make for a lot of conflict, but Crowe includes a plot involving military privatization (Bill Murray plays the financier, Alec Baldwin the near-mock-Strangelove general) and the purchase of native land that’s surprisingly aware of the false compromises and corporate bribing that historically and presently force people like Dennis Kanahele, appearing as himself in the film, into positions with no satisfying exit. Crowe doesn’t stick with the storyline, casually drifting back to romantic quadrangles, kitchen scenes full of memory, and pressure-cooker short-attention-span banter, but it’s there, a transitional point that suggests while there’s plenty in Aloha worth linking to decades of lazy archetypes, the Hawaii depicted here is one not of endless summer and worry-free soft-focus glances, but a place that, upon arrival, is already full of the past, which continues to have a gravitational pull on what happens in the present.
