Originally posted 12/17/04
The Aviator
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: John Logan
Producers: Michael Mann, Graham King, Sandy Climan, Charles Evans, Jr.
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, John C. Reilly, Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda, Adam Scott, Ian Holm, Danny Huston, Kelli Garner
I don’t say this lightly – in the eyes of Howard Hughes, as embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio, I see the same will, the same earth-shifting madness, as T.E. Lawrence, as Charles Foster Kane. The performance is that good, and in The Aviator, it has a film good enough to contain it. One of the best of the year, I’d venture to say.
Martin Scorsese has worn the heavy mantle of Our Greatest Living Filmmaker for many a long year now. And while the wailing power of his filmmaker’s voice has never weakened, his deification has blunted honest critical appraisal of a recent decade of work that has never been less than gripping, but sometimes seemed to escape his storytelling grasp. Even his epic Gangs of New York, an amazing accomplishment, still feels (when we’re able to admit it to ourselves) unresolved, short of a fully-realized vision.
But here, working from a sprawling but always deft and witty script by John Logan (Any Given Sunday, Gladiator), Scorsese the Director roars and soars. It’s his tightest, most confident work since Goodfellas, and as a long-time fan I rejoice – there’s no more uncomfortably ignoring flaws or making apologies for sloppiness. Yes, I think, this is how great he can be.
The movie opens with the young Hughes in Hollywood, pursuing his three obsessions – movies, women and airplanes, with round-the-clock fervor. And, risking the drill-bit fortune left behind by his parents, he combines the three by self-financing and directing an aerial dogfight film, Hell’s Angels, starring the delectable Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani). At the time he first sends the planes in the air he’s all of 21 years old.
The making of Angels is an early clue into the double-edged sword of his personality – a bedeviling marriage of a dreamer’s imagination and costs-be-damned obsessiveness. Boldly prevailing upon rival studio heads to lend him two cameras (the 24 he has are insufficient to shoot the climax the way it exists in his head), he films the movie but is unsatisfied by the footage – the planes don’t look fast enough with nothing in the background to which to compare them. So he hires a meteorologist (Ian Holm) to find clouds for him, clouds like “big breasts full of milk” (one half-sentence of dialogue neatly combining his favorite beverage with his favorite body part).
In one of the movie’s funniest scenes, the good Doctor, after months of failure, runs out of a tent waving a weather report, shouting “Oakland!” Then Hughes yells “Oakland!” and 100 costumed pilots all run for their planes to fly to Oakland, where the milky-breast clouds are today.
Try to imagine, then, the exasperation of Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly), hired to keep Hughes’ varied business interests in the black, when Hughes announces he wants to re-shoot the entire movie, again, to capitalize on the new trend of sound pictures.
This is the first time that Scorsese, the lover of classic Hollywood, has had the chance to depict classic Hollywood on-screen, and we sense him reveling. Look at the sumptuous design work, and the color and detail in the parties at the legendary Cocoanut Grove. One aging singer there, through his gyrations and unnatural grin, seems to wholly embody the desperate heedlessness of it all – as if by force of his smile alone the Depression and WWII might be staved off.
Seeing this decadent mayhem through Hughes’ eyes we sympathize with the discomfort and terror it often produces in him, we can also understand why long-time paramour Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) felt so drawn. As a man he could give you every extreme – exhilarating adventure and passionate appreciation – but also coldness and the most painful immature vulnerability. Blanchett is no dead ringer for Hepburn, but she nails the insouciant rhythms of her speech and every so often her head tilts just so and it’s like seeing a ghost. Some mannered lookalike job would have been sacrilege against the memory of the one-of-a-kind screen legend. In Blanchett’s wonderful performance we see the living vibrancy, the independence and the contradictions; she makes Hepburn breathe rather than show us a waxy and academic recreation.
But she was far from the only woman in his life, and we not only see his ill-fated patronage of underage starlet Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner), but his dalliance with Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), who managed to appreciate and dote on him while keeping him at a certain arms’ length. And who wouldn’t want him at arms’ length when he’s planting electronic bugs under your bed?
A lesser movie would have focused with clinical glee on the details of Hughes’ madness – his germophobia, his paranoia, the way he liked his food prepared just so and the way his brain seemed to sometimes skip the needle, leaving him repeating some phrase over and over and over again. The Aviator will take knocks from rubberneckers who longed to see DiCaprio in a fright wig with fingernail extensions cocooned in a Vegas hotel room.
But while providing enough dementia to keep it honest (a scene in a public restroom demonstrates just how paralyzing a simple doorknob could be), The Aviator allows us to see Hughes’ strength, the way he fought through these eccentricities over and over again to achieve greatness. We watch him shatter the air-speed record, cut Lindbergh’s time for flying around the globe in half, transform the air travel industry through guts and engineering genius, survive (heavily-scarred) the terrifying crash of an experimental spy plane, break Pan-Am’s monopoly on overseas travel by facing down a corrupt Senator (Alan Alda), fly a plane the size of a football stadium that was built out of wood, and yes, make a profit on Hell’s Angels.
In the end his demons defeated him, and we see signs of that inevitable doom sprinkled throughout, as well as a brief flashback which, while not fully explaining his complexities, certainly gives them a kind of understandable context. But this movie celebrates rather than gawks or pities. This all starts and ends with DiCaprio.
A decade ago we saw signs of this potential when he played the mentally-disabled younger brother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, this performance is the next step in that evolution and the fulfillment of that early promise. Lesser actors run up to scenes of madness with arms-waving glee, like Evel Knievel making sure everyone knows how many buses he’s about to jump over. But DiCaprio shows the most incredible care in dribbling out the symptoms of Howard Hughes’ mania; he takes the essence of the motto for great actors playing alcoholics – you don’t play a guy who’s falling down, you play a guy who’s trying to stay standing.