The Aviator Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT opus40 DOT org)December 20th, 2004
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE AVIATOR
Rated PG-13, 168 minutes
GIRLS, GERMS, AND AEROPLANES
Howard Hughes was once a name to conjure with. His larger-than-life stature came from an enormous bankroll and an even bigger vision. He had a brilliant mind and the chrome-plated nerve of a riverboat gambler. He was a filmmaker, a flier, a tycoon, an inventor, a daredevil, and a rake; he was also obsessive-compulsive, phobic, and probably paranoid-schizophrenic. For the last couple of decades of his fabled life he was a recluse, and when he died he had the scraggly hair and beard and uncut nails of a lunatic hermit. It is this last image that accompanied him to his grave in 1976. He was 70, and looked about a hundred years older than that.
The Aviator resurrects the Howard Hughes who cut a swath through the clouds and through the stars from the late Twenties to the late Forties. What we see is the best of Hughes, and even the best of Hughes comes with crippling baggage. But between bouts of a madness that ranges from mild eccentricity to terrifying demons, he soars with breathtaking energy, the kind of man who carries an entire era forward on the strength and scope of his vision.
The picture opens with Hughes as a little boy being bathed by his mother (Amy Sloan). She is catechizing him in a fear of germs, and schooling him in the spelling of q-u-a-r-a-n-t-i-n-e, a mantra that serves as this movie's Rosebud. As the key to his adult phobias it is the shortest of shorthands; next thing we know young Howard is 22 and embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio. His parents are dead and he's spending his inherited money like a fabulously wealthy sailor, making his Hollywood WWI air war epic, Hell's Angels. When he finishes the movie, the town is abuzz with his $2 million budget, but it is also abuzz with The Jazz Singer. Sound is the new thing, and the perfectionist Hughes reshoots his picture, nearly doubling the cost.
He is a man of four passions: movies, business, women, and flying. He spares no expense on any of them, and constantly risks ruin, but he is a man utterly unafraid of anything larger than a germ. He designs aircraft, and then puts his body where his brain is, test-piloting the planes himself. On a couple of occasions the results are disastrous. The first time he gets lucky and crash-lands in a beet field. The second time his luck runs out. In a scene of breathtaking cinematic tour-de-force, he shears through a residential neighborhood, nearly killing himself in the process.
Hughes was a legendary Lothario who bedded hundreds, perhaps thousands of women, including scores of famous Hollywood beauties. It's a pursuit that requires time and dedication, as well as charm and money, but the movie is curiously short on either eroticism or romance. The main love of his life, as told here, was Katherine Hepburn, who is played with glee by Cate Blanchett. When we first meet her (Hughes drops in via seaplane to the set of Sylvia Scarlett and spirits her off for a round of golf) Blanchett seems to be playing Hepburn with entirely too much enthusiasm, more a night club comic's impression than a character, but the performance quickly settles in and becomes enthralling. You come to realize that the role-playing is simply a part of who Hepburn is. "Stop acting," Hughes tells her during a quarrel, and when she denies she is, he says "I wonder if you even know any more." When she leaves him it's dramatic, but the heartbreak does not reach through to our side of the screen.
Hughes impulsively buys TWA, and the second half of the movie focuses on his struggle with Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) of Pan Am for access to the airline route to Europe. The showdown comes at a Senate hearing chaired by Trippe flunky Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), with Hughes improbably turning the tables on the corrupt senator and grilling him in the hearing room. I don't know if it really happened that way, but it's enjoyable theater.
Hughes's greatest struggle is with himself, with the demons of madness that periodically nibble at his heels or rise up to pull him under. A warning sign is the compulsive repeating of a single phrase, like a broken record. Sometimes the madness takes as small a form as getting bothered by a piece of lint on a man's lapel. At a more serious level, it can be scrubbing his hands till they bleed. At its worst, it's shutting himself in a room for weeks at a time without shaving or bathing, screening movies and battling germs.
When The Aviator is its best, which is a good deal of the time, it's magnificent moviemaking. Expect Oscar nominations for Blanchett and DiCaprio, and this may be the year that Martin Scorsese vaults from the ranks of bridesmaid to the top of the wedding cake. Scorsese does a brilliant job with mood and pace, and telling details. There are set pieces, in the air and in the playgrounds of Hollywood, that could only be pulled off by a master. He and screenwriter John Logan manage to avoid most of the genre pitfalls of the biopic, and create something that plays more like a real story. The production design by Dante Ferretti is sumptuous and superb. And DiCaprio encompasses charm, impetuosity, steel, and madness in a complex and thoroughly accomplished performance. By the end, when Mr. Hughes goes to Washington, it may not be the little man taking on the establishment, but it feels like a triumph of honesty and principle over the rotten workings of political-corporate greed.
At just under three hours, it cannot be said that the movie is too short, and yet some things do get short shrift. Relationships start and end, ruin is flirted with and the forgotten, madness comes and goes, and we don't always feel as if we've seen the connecting fabric. Like Hughes's epic Hell's Angels, there may well have been miles more footage in the can, material that would have explained it all. But you can only keep an audience in its seats for so long.
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