This article analyzes four Hollywood films set in Hawai'i to shed light on how particular languages and language varieties "style" (Auer 2007; Coupland 2007) Local/Hawaiian and mainland U.S. characters as certain kinds of people. Through an analysis of films featuring "haole" ("white, outsider") male protagonists who are on various journeys in Hawai'i, we analyze how cultural difference is constructed through divergent language choice, mock languages, and acts of linguistic bridging by quasi-Local characters. We draw upon Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles & Coupland 1991) to explain how linguistic divergence establishes dichotomous characterizations through language choice and other non-accommodating behaviors. As our analysis shows, Hollywood styling perpetuates Orientalist discourses (Said 1978) about "whiteness" and "nativeness" by dichotomizing Local and Hawaiian people, and by characterizing Local characters as largely antagonistic toward outsiders. At the same time, the films attempt to avoid too close a linkage to colonialist discourses by establishing quasi-Local "haole" characters as linguistic "buffers" who act as conduits for Hawaiian worldviews and Local knowledge, and who are styled linguistically as partially Local through their knowledge of Hawai'i Creole and Hawaiian. (Contains 5 notes.)