Rather than illuminate or examine Howard Hughes’ story, this film merely reproduces his achievements and setbacks.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
We’re not like everybody else," Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) tells her beau Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) in The Aviator. "We have to be very careful not to let people in, or they’ll make us into freaks."
With his famous phobias and mandarin-length nails, Hughes didn’t need much help in becoming a freak once his obsessive-compulsive disorder had gotten the best of him. But DiCaprio, who threw his clout into getting this movie made after reading a biography of Hughes, wants us to remember the accomplishments that made the tormented mogul famous to begin with, not just the bizarre behavior that turned him into a punchline.
It’s easy to see why DiCaprio would want to play Hughes. A quintessential American hero, he was rich, powerful, handsome and ingenious, a man’s man whom the ladies loved too. He dated some of the most beautiful movie stars of his time including Hepburn, whom he nearly married and he did glamorous things, producing movies in Hollywood, and flying and building planes. Then there’s the morbid fascination of those periodic breakdowns.
But Hughes turns out to be a tough nut to portray. Though he got plenty of attention in his day he was the subject of a tickertape parade, a Senate hearing and more than his share of headlines he kept his thoughts to himself and other people’s accounts of him are contradictory, so he died an enigma. A movie that either illuminated his inner life or, like Citizen Kane, examined him from a critical distance, might have been really something. The Aviator simply reproduces his achievements and setbacks.
All action and exposition, The Aviator was directed by Martin Scorsese, but it’s the Scorsese who gave us the richly atmospheric but sophomorically plotted Gangs of New York, not the director of classics like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. The movie covers about 20 years in Hughes’ adult life, starting in 1927 when he was just 21 and gambling his recently inherited fortune to make a blockbuster of a war movie, for which he had assembled what he calls "the largest private air force in the entire world." He also shot 25 miles of film and spent more than three years and a then-record $4 million to make the movie, as the tiresome faked newsreel or radio voice-over informs us.
But movies were just the beginning for Hughes. He was constantly tinkering with things, from the sleek, fast planes he helped create to the bra he designed to showcase Jane Russell’s cleavage. He also ran TWA and an airplane-manufacturing company, set a record for the fastest round-the-world flight, and barely survived a plane crash in the middle of L.A.
Scorsese’s touch is felt mostly in the creamy, carefully produced look of the movie. To evoke Hollywood’s golden age, he digitally altered the movie’s color palette over the course of its nearly three hours, so each part looks like the Hollywood films of the time in which it’s set. The stentorian narration of those faux news reports create atmosphere too, though screenwriter John Logan (The Last Samurai, Gladiator) relies on them to tell too much of the work of telling the story, skimping on dialogue except when the logorrheic Hepburn is onscreen.
Scorcese also imitates directors in the studio age by plugging great character actors like Ian Holm into parts so small they’re practically cameos. He presumably also instructed his supporting cast to employ the stylized form of acting that was popular in those days, although that sometimes backfires. Alec Baldwin’s stilted acting style and declamatory dialogue make his Juan Trippe, the head of Pan Am and Hughes’ professional nemesis, feel like a Bobo doll baddie, set up only so our hero can knock him down.
The director is surprisingly ham-handed at evoking the glamour of the studio-era Hollywood he loves. A lifeless, stagy nightclub shown near the beginning of the movie is the flip side of the seethingly alive Copa of Goodfellas, and most of the actors imitating stars of the past are woefully inadequate. Gwen Stefani looks thin and vaguely predatory as the earthy, generously upholstered Jean Harlow, while Kate Beckinsale plays the combustible Ava Gardner as a plasticine pretty girl, untouchable rather than untamable.
Story never was Scorsese’s strong point, but his best movies develop characters you remember as vividly as if you’d met them in life, and even Gangs gave us Daniel Day-Lewis’s Bill the Butcher. The closest thing to one of these fierce creatures in The Aviator is Cate Blanchett’s Kate Hepburn. Blanchett doesn’t always manage to capture Hepburn’s patrician accent, and when she reaches for it and misses, we’re momentarily lost in the gap between the actress and the indelible original she plays. But when she brays her words right, that joyful stride, upturned chin and nonstop barrage of opinions capture the essence of the woman we fell in love with onscreen. And when we see Blanchett alone with DiCaprio, her tenderness and loyalty make us feel as if we’ve finally caught a glimpse of the reclusive Hughes’ private life.
DiCaprio can’t conjure up that sense of intimacy on his own. He’s convincing as the brash 20-something tyro and touching as a middle-aged man caught in the tightening grip of his own neuroses, repeating set phrases like a malfunctioning Stepford wife. But he can’t break through this movie’s busy surface to make that kind of electric connection with the audience. Instead, he’s swept along as The Aviator rolls on, like one of the newsreels it keeps quoting, reporting everything as if it had the same significance or none at all.
Rated PG-13. Contains thematic elements, sexuality, nudity, language and a crash sequence.