THE AVIATOR: Scorsese's Spruce Goose Soars High

The Aviator is a huge sweeping almost old- fashioned epic of a film. If you expect that it will also contain stunning insights or revelations about Howard Hughes you will be disappointed. The movie shows quite a bit, explains just a little, impresses with superb performances and cameos, dazzles with rich recreations of a bygone era and delivers sequences of such cinematic bravura that it will take your breath away. It is a bigger, better film than any you’ve seen in the past several years and a grand scale triumph for director Martin Scorsese.

The film is 169 minutes long but moves along as fast as any 2-hour movie you’ll see this year. At times the film is large, loud and busy with crescendos of movement and sound that will overwhelm you, but at other times it is quiet and subtle and even warmly romantic. You aren’t bullied into submission by this film the way an over-budgeted action picture likes to do. The film breathes and allows both the actors in the film and the audience at times to react and respond and absorb some of what is happening. At other times the film purposefully doesn’t give us time to react. In one sequence we want to know more about what is going on but the film cannot show us. It can’t suddenly change it’s pace to show us more later either and so it keeps moving ahead, focused on its narrow perspective of a 20 year period of Howard Hughes life stretching from the late 20s to the late 1940s.

The script by John Logan builds to several big scenes and in between fills in as much as it can with mostly accurate details of Hughes’ life. There’s plenty that is touched upon and then passed over without additional comment. Flaws? Does the film try to do too much and wind up doing too little? Or is the film fleshing out the huge Hollywood epic with wonderful details and moments you normally don’t see? I’d say it attempts and succeeds at the latter.

There are flaws born of the compromise necessary in a project this large and ambitious. You can focus on any section of the film and find ways to tear it apart and down but when taken as a whole piece, each flaw has to weighed and considered differently and most I believe will dissolve.

Scorsese doesn’t hide the fact that he has modeled this film after Orson Welles’ CITIZEN KANE. In fact there are several shots in which DiCaprio looks an awful lot like Welles playing Kane. The large epic sweep that Scorsese showed he was capable of in films like Kundun, Age of Innocence, New York, New York and Gangs of New York has been fully realized here. You won’t find the overt violence and vulgarity of GANGS in this film. It very much feels like a contained period piece—something that captures the feel of a 1940s Hollywood movie. It isn’t muted and overly stylized like AGE was criticized for being. It also doesn’t inject grandeur and sweep at the expense of pacing in the way GANGS was presented. We also don’t have a terrible choice for a piece of modern music in a period piece film like happened in Gangs There’s sophisticated old Hollywood style glamour in all aspects of this production.

The casting of the film is very strong—particularly when one considers the insurmountable challenges faced by the task. So casting it like you might an old Hollywood movie seems like the right thing to do. You do a modern version of typecasting and fill the roles with actors who will make strong solid impressions. You have John C. Reilly play another door mat kind of character as Noah Dietrich, Howard Hughes right hand yes man who must figure out how to keep the businesses running and come up with the money to fund Howard’s whims at a moments notice. Reilly finds moments to make more of the part than what appears on the written page. Ian Holm plays the academic and shy meteorologist Dr. Fitz – a character that is essential to one scene but gets to impersonate someone else in another scene leading to one of the films funniest scenes in which Howard Hughes defends his sexy THE OUTLAW film against the film censor board.

So who plays head film censor, Joe Breen? Why Edward Herrman of course, who can play overly stiff conservative prudes more comfortably than anyone. He’s fully engaged in his portrayal here which makes it a winning win. Alec Baldwin has really excelled in recent years at playing deviously slick characters and his portrayal of Juan Trippe the powerful, conniving, politically connected head of Pan Am fits right into his recent acting resume. He turns in the kind of first-rate performance you would hope and expect him to. Alan Alda who hasn’t worked as visibly as Baldwin in recent years, has been cast as the manipulative powerful Senator Brewster. Alda’s made a late film career of playing powerful jerks and the part fits him like a glove allowing Scorsese to get a rich colorful performance out of him.

Rock diva Gwen Stefani who appeared in a video mimicking screen sex siren Jean Harlow, takes on the role briefly here. She has the platinum blond hair, but her body type isn’t Harlow. Still, the image projected in the far-shot differing from the image in the close-up, works well for this movie and I’m sure if Scorsese was after a caricature imitation of Harlow he would have gotten one. Stefani only appears briefly and is given very little to do but be on Howard’s arm for a movie premiere. Jude Law makes a quick appearance as Errol Flynn and you can believe instantly he’s a dashing ill-mannered rogue the moment he makes his appearance. Ava Gardner to most is a beautiful famous face from the past that had famous relationships with people like Frank Sinatra. Kate Beckinsale is a beautiful somewhat famous face and Scorsese almost gets away with mis-casting her in the role. I didn’t see much Ava in the performance but Beckinsale carries off the underwritten role well enough that it won’t matter very much. She does very well in a couple of powerful scenes.

The second most daring role of the film has been given to Cate Blanchett who has the seemingly impossible task of playing Katherine Hepburn. How do you imitate someone as familiar, respected and distinctive as Hepburn and make her more than a two-dimensional cartoon? Cate gives an impression of Kate through some theatrical gestures and a deliberate voice pattern without completely mimicking the legendary actress. The performance sketches in a Hepburn persona into a full and rich characterization that winds up dancing with DeCaprio’s Hughes as gracefully as Ginger Rogers danced with Fred Astaire. The chemistry of the actors couldn’t be better when they are together. Logan’s script gives us witty dialogue circa The Philadelphia Story. Blanchett should certainly be nominated for several acting awards for her superb and very risky performance. It’s easily among the best of the year.

Leonard DeCaprio has developed the reputation of being the too-boyish runt in a litter of actors. He seemed like he was a 12 year old Bowery Boy reject in Titanic and he didn’t have the continental flair to invent a interesting enough every-man hero that was needed to carry Gangs of New York. In both roles he was too colorless and bland. He also seemed too young and lacking in confident command. The films around him had to compensate for his lack of charisma. It was as much the script’s fault as DeCaprio, but he didn’t do enough to compensate. However, write DeCaprio a character with some colorful flaws to act and watch him deliver the goods. He turned in a fine performance as the mentally retarded 17-year-old Arnie in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and as the drug addicted athlete in The Basketball Diaries (bad movie-excellent performance) and he was easily the best thing in his five-minute appearance in Woody Allen’s Celebrity.

DeCaprio doesn’t actually resemble the real Hughes, but he takes on the part and dives into it with everything he has got. It turns out that is a lot, because even when he is allowed to over-act slightly in the midst of a manic-depressive break-down, he gives several subtle layers to his performance building onto a characterization that shifts and changes over the course in the film in wholly believable ways. It’s not just a characterization but also the kind of rich layered performance of a character dancing on the edge of a self-destructive madness you expect would fascinate and bring out the best in director Scorsese. It does.

THE AVIATOR is Scorsese channeling CITIZEN KANE in style. There are moments of breathtaking cinematic thrills involving recreations of Hollywood’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Hollywood premieres at the old Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, a couple of aerial sequences as excitingly filmed as anything you have ever seen and the incredible crash of a plane into a residential section of Beverly Hills—a sequence you simply have to see for yourself on the biggest screen possible. There are also the thrills of a film full of rich performances and wonderful scenes choreographed seamlessly into creating a convincing big movie portrait of a deeply flawed wealthy celebrity businessman.

We’re overwhelmed by the film of course, which is a good thing because there are factual over-sights and the period of time the film covers, stops before the really dark and troubled side of Hughes emerges when in the 1950’s he took over RKO (another Kane/Welles link) became even more paranoid and obsessive believing completely the United States was being infiltrated by communists. Although he wound up helping some of those who were blacklisted by HUAC in the 50s (like director Nicholas Ray) he was also part of the problem. In the 1960s most of us remember how he became known as the crack-pot multi-millionaire who by the 1970s became a germ obsessed hermit in a Las Vegas hotel suite and then bought and stayed in one of the bungalows of the Beverly Hills Hotel until his death in 1976. There was the also the fake Howard Hughes biography orchestrated by Clifford Irving and brought to the masses because of a famous 60 Minutes segment. This latter period of Hughes’ life might make a fascinating dark psychological movie. That’s not what this one was aiming for.

I’ll also note that Clifford Irving was part of Orson Welles’ brilliant F Is For Fake released before the Irving/Hughes scandal broke.

Welles toyed with the idea back in the late 1930s of making a film based on Howard Hughes and he considered doing something on Hughes at several times during his career. Instead, Welles based CITIZEN KANE loosely on William Randolph Hearst. In the film the secret of Kane’s last words, Rosebud is believed to be hidden in his childhood and is the key to unlocking the enigma of the man. In the end, those investigating Kane’s life do not discover the meaning of Rosebud and the audience realizes the notion of a word that could possibly unleash the secret of a man’s life is a ridiculous one. Rosebud was rumored to be a nickname Hearst used and it embarrassed and angered him to have it waved around in the public. He went on a mean-spirited campaign to destroy Welles’ reputation and career and basically succeeded in doing just that.

The Aviator opens up with a scene from Hughes’ childhood. His conservative mother is giving him a sponge bath. He must spell the word quarantine. His mother is concerned about typhoid fever and tells the young Hughes to avoid associating with colored people.

Is this a key to the manic-obsessive phobias that completely overwhelmed Hughes late in his life? During one of his breakdowns later in the film Hughes shifts into remembering to spell quarantine to regain some sense of balance. Does this mean something in particular? We aren’t sure, but we are given little time to contemplate.

It is disappointing that some critics expect this movie to somehow come up with an analysis or possible motivation for Hughes’ behaviors. If you expect to understand Howard Hughes better after watching this film, you should look elsewhere. This is a film about excess, fame and obsession more than about Hughes himself. We learn about Hughes’ rise to fame and his spoiled rich boy whims that meant he could make movies however he wanted because he could afford to. When he ran out of money he simply came up with ways to get more money and continued spending it.

A wonderful scene that is probably completely fictitious shows us something very important. Hughes decides that he needs two more cameras to capture the extremely expensive dogfight sequence he is about to film for his HELL’S ANGELS movie. He already has 24 cameras but he wants two more. So he asks Louis B. Mayer (Stanley DeSantis) if he can borrow or rent or buy two cameras from the studio. Mayer and his cronies are incredulous that Hughes already has 24 cameras and thinks he needs two more. He is also surprised that Hughes would expect a competing studio to help him get his cameras for his movie. He explains to Hughes that his movie has cost way too much to ever turn a profit and that he will have a lot of trouble in getting the film into theaters when it is finished because the studios own all the theaters.

The scene illustrates that Hughes was operating as a completely independent maverick outside of the system. He would overcome problems simply by throwing enough money at it. But money can never solve all problems.

The film contrasts the image, fame and money of Hughes’ lifestyle with quieter moments revealing that the man who seems to have everything is actually a man full of phobias and eccentricities that at times would imprison him and make him completely helpless. The scene where Hughes manically washes his hands, and then cannot open the bathroom door because his hand cannot touch the doorknob is a particularly memorable one.

Anyway, I will leave up to you to discover everything this film has to offer. It isn’t a movie that concentrates on giving us possible motivations for how Howard Hughes acted during his life. It doesn’t deliver heavy handed messages, instead it is almost an old fashioned epic type of film that shows and expect the audience to get their own insights, or read a detailed biography of Hughes to learn more about the man himself. It is a film that allows the audience to draw parallels to the past and present by what we watch. It is film large in scale that concentrates on part of a spoiled rich man’s life that manages to show us a warm human side to a wholly spoiled privileged class of people whose myths born of smoke and mirror are exposed subtly by this story.



Copyright© Christopher J. Jarmick 12/2004. All rights Reserved