Cameron Crowe began his career as the voice of a young generation, writing for Rolling Stone in his teens and going undercover at Clairemont High School in San Diego, eventually turning his experiences into a book and eventually the screenplay for the 1982 comedy classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It would be another seven years before he stepped behind the camera to direct another teen classic, Say Anything…, and he only seemed to grow up throughout the 1990s as the filmmaker behind beloved adult dramas like Singles and Jerry Maguire.
Today, despite a few minor misfires in the 2000s, Cameron Crowe enjoys a reputation as one of the most reliable character-driven filmmakers of his generation. So with his latest film Aloha hitting theaters this weekend, CraveOnline decided to ask the all-important question: What’s the best Cameron Crowe movie ever?
So join our film critics William Bibbiani, Witney Seibold and Brian Formo as they each present their picks for the one film they think of as Cameron Crowe’s finest work, contribute your own picks in the comments below, and come back next Wednesday for another new and highly debatable installment of The Best Movie Ever!
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Witney Seibold’s Pick: Say Anything… (1989)
Cameron Crowe never forgot what it was like to be in love for the first time. He remembers the awkward first thrill. He remembers the nervous first sexual experience. He remembers the awkward clash of classes that can come from dating someone richer or poorer than you. He remembers the intense transition from mere infatuation to a real intense, real-life, adult love. He remembers what it feels like to be young. All of his experiences, he perfectly infused into his characters Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court in Say Anything…, a film that stands not only as Crowe’s best film, but as one of the great movie romances.
It’s real, palpable, gorgeous. It’s a movie about the way we love, and how we can sometimes be mismatched in – and afraid of – our own intensity. Love is something we long for in youth, and are terrified of. Say Anything… is about working through that intensity. More than that, though, it’s a film about growing up. Yes, it’s about the love story, but the love – as in real life – is not where Lloyd and Diane end. They have to figure out a way to pursue their dreams, please their parents, and perhaps realize that their parents may not be the gods they thought they were. There is a melancholy to the movie, but not through romantic angst. It’s through watching your youth flee from you. It’s appropriate that Say Anything… begins with a high school graduation. Graduation and youthful love are intense and fun, but they are, we soon learn, only the first step.
All of Cameron Crowe’s films, even his bad ones (We Bought a Zoo? Oh dear) have that simple and intense romantic camaraderie, and that realization that there will be a next step, even if there was an emotional injury in the past. His best films, though (I would also consider Almost Famous to be one of his best), deal with young people who know how to love, but aren’t cynical enough yet to leaven their romantic expression.
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William Bibbiani’s Pick: Jerry Maguire (1996)
Cameron Crowe is an exceptional director, using canny casting decisions and an impeccable taste in music to bring his screenplays to life. But more than anything he’s a superlative screenwriter who has somehow, over the years, honed the remarkable ability to mold pleasing schmaltz out of distinctive characters. His movies have the emotional wallop of unapologetic cheese, but his delivery is damn near art house. Real life, it seems, really can reach the same dramatically satisfying moments we demand from our fictional dramas. And while some folks gravitate towards his semi-autobiographical Almost Famous or his wistful teen romance Say Anything… as the ultimate example of that perfect balance, I instead put to you these four little words: “Show me the money.”
Tom Cruise stars as the title character in Jerry Maguire, a successful sports agent who realizes his life has no meaning. When his attempt to inspire his fellow agents to do their jobs right, not just efficiently, gets him fired, he finds himself with only one client – a marginally successful football player played by Cuba Gooding Jr. – and an assistant played by Renee Zellweger, who mostly joins Jerry’s crusade because of a romantic crush, but who develops a meaningful relationship with Jerry over time.
The big moments in Jerry Maguire have since become ingrained in the pop culture consciousness: “You complete me,” “You had me at hello,” and of course Tom Cruise screaming “Show me the money!” to prove his commitment to one client, even at the cost of all the others. These quotable lines of dialogue reduce complex ideas to satisfying one liners, effectively turning a rich character drama into a simple crowd pleaser. But the depth of Jerry Maguire never disappears. Cruise gives a fantastic performance as a man who has and then instantly regrets an epiphany, forced to live out his ideals even when they’re inconvenient as hell. It’s a difficult tone to strike, that shifting balance of pride and humiliation, and Crowe’s clever and emotional screenplay gives all of the actors plenty to work with.
Jerry Maguire is a joy, and a joy that rewards you for leaving your brain on. That’s a rare thing for a studio release about a handful of realistic people wandering life’s daily miasma of dignity, indignity, work and family. It’s a tough call, because all of Cameron Crowe’s movies are pretty great (even We Bought a Zoo is a fun bit of schmaltz), but I’m calling it: Jerry Maguire has the coin, and it also has the kwan.
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Brian Formo’s Pick: Almost Famous (2000)
Cameron Crowe (like Hal Ashby before him) is a great generational director. He had a run of films from 1989 to 2000 that completely speak to the time and place they are set in. If his films are less stronger post-2000 I think it has a little to do with optimism being on the outs. Jaded cynicism is in. And Crowe has never been cynical. As a writer he observes, and his heart swells for the people who feel unnoticed becoming noticed. In fact, his only foray outside of that secret garden of optimism was Vanilla Sky. Crowe excelled with optimism because he grew up under the “children are the future” banner and his best films focused on teen realities facing that pressure. Now teens in films have a different pressure: saving the world in alternate realities.
I believe that Crowe’s best films utilize his journalist feature-writing eye (Crowe wrote for Rolling Stone; and a few of his stories became the basis of his films): the discovered sex lives of an 80s teenager that became Fast Times of Ridgemont High, the we-were-here-first flag plant in Singles (set amongst the Seattle grunge scene that exploded on release of the film), and his own semi-autobiographical Almost Famous.
Almost Famous is certainly the top of the Crowe charts for me. Almost Famous isn’t just a great coming of age movie, but it is also one of the best films about fandom and the distance required for fandom to work. William (Patrick Fugit) is the teen Crowe stand-in: a high school rock journalist who idolizes the “uncool” rock critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman, working acting wonders with almost all of his scenes taking place on the phone), and has been given a cover story for Rolling Stone to cover an emerging American rock band as they traverse the early 1970s US highways, show to show.
There are two parallel stories in Almost Famous: there’s William’s family (including a hilarious weary of rock-n-rollers mama, Frances McDormand) who want the best for him, and William’s attempts to find his own family through interactions with “the guitarist with the mystique” (Billy Crudup), and the band’s harem of female fans (Kate Hudson, Anna Paquin, Fairuza Balk). But while those are the most memorable, fun, and heartfelt characters, Crowe more knowingly examines the distance a journalist has to have from its subject in order to get a proper feature. And how hard that distance can feel if you’re a kid looking to fit in. It’s uncool to observe as a teenager. It’s cool to experience. William does indeed experience a lot on the road with Stillwater, but by the mere fact of his journalist role, William has to grow up faster than the band he’s profiling.
On a personal aside, Almost Famous holds a special “Golden God” place in my heart because it was the first movie review I ever was assigned and paid for. It made me optimistic about the profession I was pursuing. Now 15 years older, I can also see that Crowe injects an awareness that being entirely hopeful is foolish—like having optimism of journalism, or thinking you’ll be the rock star’s best friend—but he just can’t help hoping everything will work out for the uncool.
