WWTE #6: As the Crowe Flies
A cursory reflection on Cameron Crowe, and a vote for sentimentality
This month, I have been a tad preoccupied with work and other writing projects, but I decided to slide through with an impromptu transmission on a director whose work I fell backwards into revisiting over the last week of March: Cameron Crowe. It’s a revisit I’d been meaning to do for a little while, though I think unconsciously, it was moved to the front of my head after seeing a prominent and fittingly wholesome reference to Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo in the new Peter Farrelly comedy, Ricky Stanicky.1
Re-watching Crowe’s work got me thinking about cinematic sentimentality, something I strongly consider a welcome feature in modern cinema as we move more and more towards insincerity being the norm, plaguing all genres, but particularly the romance film. While it is definitively lacking in American cinema at large, Crowe’s specific brand of sentimentality was hardly ever the norm, though. There really is no 1:1 equivalent to Crowe that I can think of. He’s the ultimate self-insert director, and a true beacon of optimism. He is a telegrapher of positivity, and the crowning king of clichés, so much so that, as you can see, I cannot help but succumb to clichés as I describe his work, but I came to each one organically – that is what he does. With the iconic Say Anything… and Jerry Maguire in particular, both of which hit you with a culture-defining moment every 10 minutes or so, he helped refine the American rom-com, and yet each film defies their trappings.
This will be far from my most in-depth Writing with the Enemy entry – I’m dipping my toes into listicles, sue me!! – but in revisiting Crowe’s work, it struck me as a fun challenge to pair his films up with other features to form double features that could deepen folks’ appreciation for a pretty singular filmmaker whose work is often written off for its perceived mushiness.
Say Anything… (1989) + When Harry Met Sally… (1989)2
Upon revisit, Say Anything… impressed me the most out of Crowe’s work, for its delicate romance, its earnest and non-hierarchical approach to its high school characters, as well as its subtle interrogation of gender dynamics that it bakes into its romance. Having the audience root for a relationship that other characters in the film – and society at large, as the film depicts it – dismiss due to ingrained archetypes, as well as characters’ perceived success and potential. As a classic rom-com with all of those interests, I feel like it pairs perfectly with the similarly iconic When Harry Met Sally…, which also tells you that its central romance is unlikely to succeed at the beginning, and on the basis of its natural dialogue and lead performances, gets you to buy into it by the end.
Singles (1992) + The Decline of Western Civilization (1981)
The episodic nature of Singles, its near-documentary approach in some of its scenes, and its interest in a specific music scene in the 90s (grunge, in this case), recalls the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, and its two sequels, which depict rock and punk scenes from the 80s and 90s at their most unflinching, with a particular focus on the youth who are caught up in each scene. The film also predates Almost Famous’s journalistic approach to music scenes – which, of course, is born from Crowe’s own working experiences - though it's obviously much more comedic and romantic, with a charmingly clumsy emphasis in emotional insecurity.
The film’s realism-based approach also reminds me of Nicole Holofcener’s early work from around the same time, particularly Lovely & Amazing. The film could also pair well with some classic 90s rock-centric comedies, like Airheads, SLC Punk, Wayne’s World or The Doom Generation.
Jerry Maguire (1996) + Blue Chips (1994)
Having not really taken to it on my first watch many years ago, I sharply turned around on Jerry Maguire on this recent viewing. It’s a shaggy and earnest sports-romance-comedy-drama that lends so much time to the patient unraveling of its romance, and to Jerry’s balancing of work and love following an epiphany that predicts the characters in the majority of Crowe's following films. It’s also refreshingly uncanny to see how human Cruise’s performance is in this from a modern perspective.
It feels like it’s becoming the standard here to pair a Crowe film with one that takes a grimmer approach to the subject matter, but I think that’s only because Crowe’s work is blindingly optimistic and everything else seems pessimistic by comparison. But, I think a good film to couple with Jerry Maguire is the late William Friedkin’s Blue Chips, which also interrogates the dynamic between a sports coach/agent and an up-and-coming player — specifically, a white agent and a Black athlete — and studies how that is impacted by power, race, and the general powers that be of the sports world (with a screenplay by Ron Shelton, who is far from new to this).
Almost Famous (2000) + Mistaken for Strangers (2013)
Almost Famous is powered by wholehearted admiration for older siblings from a younger sibling’s perspective, and its protagonist, William, openly lets that guide his life path. The idea of carrying that admiration into Crowe’s tradition of protagonists embracing their truest selves in spite of societal expectations makes me think of the heart-wrenching dynamic between brothers in Mistaken for Strangers, where the brother of Matt Berninger, lead singer of The National (a band made up of two other pairs of brothers and Matt), follows the band on tour and is only undermined, chewed up and spit out by an industry that has embraced his brother but deemed him uncool in the snap of a finger. Almost Famous’s reality, while blunt, challenging and eye-opening for William, is far more romantic, but I think these could easily be sibling films, whether in spite of or because of that.
Vanilla Sky (2001) + Mr. Sardonicus (1961)
Vanilla Sky is Crowe’s foray into genre cinema, while snugly fitting into Crowe’s mold of successful businessmen questioning their purpose and in the meantime finding true love. The image of Cruise’s character in the prosthetic mask that he dons after a car accident is burned into my brain, and it reminds me of the the frozen grinning face of the titular character from William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus, which also concerns a man who is tempted by money and success and ends up a recluse who becomes depressed due to his appearance. While Castle’s film is far more horror-tinged, Crowe’s film delves further into the horrific than anything else he’s done before or since, and Cruise’s casting in particular lends to a type of metatextuality that Castle practically made a career off of.
Elizabethtown (2005) + Smorgasbord (1983)
Both Elizabethtown and Jerry Lewis’s shockingly grim final directorial effort Smorgasbord open with an overly light and comical attempt at suicide (or several in the case of Smorgasbord) and continue as episodic and weirdly macabre personal journeys in which the main character confronts their past. Both end with love, but Elizabethtown’s is far more saccharine and hopeful – committing to a genuine arc, in fairness to it – whereas Smorgasbord cannot help but feel like a cry for help, but I think both films will leave a lot of viewers actively put off, unless you’re a sicko like me, in which case you’ll enjoy both!3
We Bought a Zoo (2011) + Journey to the Shore (2015)
On its surface, We Bought a Zoo is the plainest Crowe movie, a crowd-pleaser that seems to do exactly what is promised on the tin — the title is uttered at least twice within the film — but has actually lingered with me a lot, in large part due to its final scene which dips into the supernatural ever so gently. It cements the present theme of honoring your passed loved ones through your family, through the spaces you occupy, and through memory practices. This space-based meditation on grief and romance reminds me of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Journey to the Shore (and that scene reminds me of Kurosawa’s sensibility generally) which also toys with the metaphysical as a playground for remembering a lost loved one, and granting them new agency as you’re forced to continue into the physical world without then. May we all buy a zoo!
Aloha (2015) + Aloha (2015), again
There are movies that, considering their outward tone, touch on unexpected subject matter that remind me of Aloha — The Book of Henry, for example — and there are ambitious late-period rom-coms that are as scattershot as they are charming that remind me of Aloha — like How Do You Know, from Crowe collaborator James L. Brooks — but the film that I recommend pairing with Aloha more than any other, is another watch of Aloha. It may take some serious recollecting after you’ve sat down to watch this tropical star-studded romance and are faced with a battle for the colonization of Hawaii via satellites controlled by American billionaires, but the sheer ambition of enmeshing that with Crowe’s usual – typically much smaller scale – interests earns this a lot of credit. I think its tone is precisely what makes that plot-line feel so incomprehensible to many, but approaching this on its own terms helps to unlock the film, which I think has a lot more to offer than it credit for. That being said, more than any other Crowe film, there are some racial politics and representation that are understandably off-putting, and unfortunately compromise its potential for greatness.
In closing, I think that if you are ever in a rut, I can – from experience – tell you that falling into a days-long Cameron Crowe marathon, whether intentionally or not, is a unique experience that will equally confound you and warm your heart. At the heart of this experience, hearing a teary-eyed Tom Cruise say that “we live in a cynical world” did something to me, and I can recommend it for that alone.
And, as always, these are the best new-to-me films that I saw in March!
To Be or Not to Be (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
High Plains Drifter (dir. Clint Eastwood, 1973)
Field of Dreams (dir. Phil Alden Robinson, 1989)
Evil Dead Trap (dir. Toshiharu Ikeda, 1988)
The Day After Tomorrow (dir. Roland Emmerich, 2004)
The Seat Filler (dir. Nick Castle, 2004)
The Garden (dir. Frederick Wiseman, 2005)
Thanks for reading! See you next month!
John Cena is undeniably to key to what makes Ricky a fundamental Farrelly text, and bringing that up has honestly got me thinking about the Farrelly brothers as fitting contemporaries to Crowe in a lot of ways.
I’m only just noticing the shared release date and ellipses in the title as I’m formatting this.
To be clear, I like Elizabethtown (perhaps more than most) but I think Smorgasbord is one of the great films, and a completely fundamental text for me.
We Bought a Zoo RULLLEEESS