The Aviator Review
by Mark R. Leeper (markrleeper AT yahoo DOT com)January 7th, 2005
THE AVIATOR
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Martin Scorsese's biography of Howard
Hughes is full of the stories about the eccentric
billionaire, but fails to bring us into the mind
of the man. Instead of showing the inner self of
the man, we learn little more than we could have
from newspaper clippings. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4)
or 7/10
Popular actors Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio each act in a biographical film for the winter film season. It is valuable to compare them and see how different they actually are. DiCaprio is the flashy and high finance maven Howard Hughes in THE AVIATOR and DiCaprio is the much more modest J. M. Barrie in FINDING NEVERLAND. These are two very different men in two very different films. Barrie's love of children was mostly a quiet and private thing. Hughes's love of shiny planes and flashy women was plastered across the headlines of the newspapers and gossip magazines of the world. Because FINDING NEVERLAND focuses in on a short segment of the man's life where only a limited amount is known, the film could fill in the blanks and make Barrie a warm and comprehensible man, someone you would want to know. The film about Hughes is more a scrapbook of much that was said about Hughes from his twenties on, positive and negative, but does not reach inside the man. So much was said about Hughes that the film must rush to retell enough of the stories in its somewhat bloated 160-minute length and there is no time for Martin Scorsese to reach inside the man and make him more real than an icon. Praise for FINDING NEVERLAND would be to say it was a warm and loving film. Praise for THE AVIATOR would be to say that yes, it was pretty much all there.
The film covers Hughes's career from his arrival in Hollywood with apparently more money than sense. As the story begins he is producing for his film HELL'S ANGELS some of the most impressive aerial footage ever caught on film. (See the film if you don't believe it. What he created without special effects was unsurpassed until CGI.) But his answer to every problem is to throw more money at it. For the film he has assembled the largest private air force in the world and he needs 26 cameras to make it all work. To get the last two cameras he even tries to borrow them from Louis B. Meyer.
Hughes was the heir to an oil equipment fortune and could use his money to get whatever he wanted. This included fast planes and faster women. He was a movie producer who was frequently lucky though rarely tasteful. He liked sexy actresses and cultivated relationships some of the most beautiful and most high profile women. This included Jean Harlow (played by Gwen Stefani), Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett in a magnetic impression of Hepburn), and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale)
As Scorsese paints him in THE AVIATOR, Hughes is not a genius when it comes to aircraft. Instead, he could afford to put good people on his payroll and then he could be very demanding. He happened along at a time when there was a lot of progress that could be made in aviation and with a feel for how air equipment could be improved he demanded those improvements of his very good staff.
It was a method that worked for him and his staff was able to deliver to him many cutting-edge to aircraft. He wanted the thrills of the new planes the way he wanted the thrills he got from young starlets. He test flew the planes that were made from him, occasionally crashing.
Then came 1946 and the crash during his test flight of the XF-11. Scorsese shows us the crash in graphic and horrifying detail and we realize the man is breakable. Until that point he seemed unstoppable. But in seconds his life was turned around, and he nearly dies. His lifestyle had been fed by the excesses of the Roaring 20s, not dulled by the Depression, and then had been given new life by the government's demands for aircraft in the war. His affluent life style during some of the worst economic years in the nation's history brought him worldwide notoriety. In moments the tide was reversed. THE AVIATOR shows this as the signpost of a tragic reversal of Hughes's fortunes. In spite of setbacks he is forever a high-roller, buying TWA, but the wolves sense his weakness and bring him down. The plot of his life is actually fairly parallel to that of Tony Camonte, the main character in his own film SCARFACE. Both make the right moves and are amazingly successful, but over-reach themselves and see their empires crumble. Alec Baldwin plays Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan- American Airlines, who is one who goes for Hughes's throat. Here Baldwin plays essentially the same cool but deadly character he played in THE COOLER.
While predators are picking at Hughes from without, the personal demons of his own obsessive-compulsive nature are eating him from within. A fear of microbes that his mother instilled in him as a little boy ate him from within. Small things will drive him off the track of a conversation. A piece of lint would drive him to distraction. His manias drag him into insanity. We see all this happening. Leonardo DiCaprio goes through all the steps and actually manages to look like Hughes as it happens. But we don't learn anything we did not already know about Hughes.
This film tells a lot about what the world thought about Howard Hughes without peering too deeply into the enigma. But, yes, what there is to know about Hughes's history is pretty much all there.
I rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.
Mark R. Leeper
[email protected]
Copyright 2005 Mark R. Leeper
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
