The Aviator

reviewed Sunday, 15 Jan 2005

The Aviator is a gorgeous, stylish movie that takes its cues from the glamorous era of Hollywood that Howard Hughes lived in and embodied.  You can feel director Martin Scorsese’s adoration for this world vibrating off the screen, often in more subtle ways than you might notice.  Scorsese wanted each year in the film to look the way a color film of that year would have looked – starting with a primitive two-strip Technicolor process and becoming progressively more sophisticated.  So you may notice, for instance, that peas in an early scene are blue instead of green, and you may notice the colors gradually become truer and richer, even as Hughes is fading.

Leonardo DiCaprio is excellent as the enigmatic Hughes, both in his master-of-the-universe and his scary-freak incarnations.  The movie concentrates on his Hollywood years, jumping directly from his childhood to his directing Hell’s Angels and ending before his truly freaky Las Vegas period, but there’s still plenty of weirdness to mine.  My one complaint with the movie would be its facile and unsatisfying reason for Hughes’ obsession with germs and disease:  his mother’s paranoia.  Maybe there’s no easy way to know or to show what made him keep his urine in bottles and wear Kleenex boxes on his feet – maybe it’s just inexplicable mental illness – but it’s annoying to imply that his mother’s fears of his getting sick caused his extreme behavior.

The celebrity casting generally works, although there’s no reason for Jude Law to show up as Errol Flynn except to have another name, both in the cast list and the character list.  Alan Alda is great fun as the corrupt Senator Brewster, as is Alec Baldwin, in growly villain mode as Brewster’s puppet master, Juan Trippe of Pan-Am, who wants to drive Hughes’ TWA out of business.  Ian Holm does an amusing turn as a professor Hughes impulsively hires to provide weather forecasts (and impromptu measurements of actresses’ cleavage).  Best of the lot, though, is Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn.  I had my reservations – Hepburn is a fellow Bryn Mawr alumna, and I admire her greatly, and Blanchett doesn’t look the least bit like her.  Nevertheless, Blanchett superbly captures her spark and her wit (though she makes her perhaps too much of a chatterbox, albeit a brainy one).

The film truly takes flight in a few aerial sequences – Hughes manning the camera himself, in the nose of a biplane, to shoot a thrilling dogfight sequence for Hell’s Angels; and his romantic night flight over Los Angeles with Hepburn.  In very different ways, both scenes capture the allure and mystique of flight, and Hughes is more alive in these moments than at any other time.  When he’s on, he’s really on – I’d love to see the original footage of the Congressional hearings in which he defended himself against charges of war profiteering.  In the movie, he’s a cloistered, gibbering, paranoid mess, but he somehow pulls himself together masterfully for the hearings.  I’m curious to see if he really came across so poised.

Hughes’ story is fascinating, and Scorsese and DiCaprio do a marvelous job of bringing this complex, odd figure to life.  I highly recommend it.

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