The Aviator
Review
by : Eric Barker
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Starring:
Leonardo DiCaprio (Howard Hughes), Cate Blanchett (Katharine
Hepburn), Kate Beckinsale (Ava Gardner), John C. Reilly
(Noah Dietrich), Alec Baldwin (Juan Trippe), Alan Alda
(Sen. Ralph Owen Brewster)
Cinematography by: Robert
Richardson
Film Editing by: Thelma Schoonmaker
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
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Marty and Leo find they really can work together. |
The
amazing world of daredevil tycoon Howard Hughes, before an
array of untreated neuroses turned him into the 20th century’s
most famous recluse.
It’s
a sure sign that a film director has attained immortality
when his most dynamic innovations have moved beyond the shock
of the new and become so absorbed into the state of the art,
they seem to be inevitable rules of movie grammar. This can
work against the director if he isn’t careful - his
new films can begin to seem like retreads, or stubborn attachment
to a certain style, rather than an ongoing engagement with
the things that matter in life.
This has
sometimes been true of Martin Scorsese, a first rank iconoclast
who remains a serious, redoubtable artist in the age of corporate
Hollywood. During his long rise to legendary status, he has
honed an audio/visual style that makes full use of the cinema’s
many palettes - a constantly moving camera to match his storylines,
bold shifts between color and black-and-white, multiple camera
speeds and point of view, and soundtracks so densely layered
they are almost a physical sensation. It is a style that has
inspired many others, but one that only Scorsese really knows
how to use. It’s overwrought, manic, teetering at the
far edges of reason, just like Martin Scorsese himself, a
deeply personal filmmaker who follows each unbelievably risky
venture with yet another, unbelievably risky venture, who
continually transforms his own obsessive vision into the,
er, stuff that dreams are made of.
Scorsese’s
latest contemplation of the American Dream, The Aviator, is
his most deftly entertaining movie since Goodfellas
(1990), and his most assured, not just dazzling us with everything
there is to love about a “Martin Scorsese Picture,”
but with everything there is to love about the movies themselves,
the way they flash before us at the speed of consciousness,
poking our fantasies, dreams and fears, skipping across the
spectrum of emotion like a glissando. It’s as if the
act of finally completing his last film, Gangs of New
York (2002), a monumental (and under-appreciated) epic,
which had weighed on his mind and heart for three decades,
suddenly left him light-headed and giddy, free to let one
of the great cinematic imaginations of our time - that is,
his own - go soaring.
Ostensibly,
The Aviator is about Howard Hughes, whom most people
know as a kind of mythic billionaire-hermit who never clipped
his toenails after, oh, say 1960. Wracked with obsessive-compulsive
fears that finally consumed him, Hughes simply disappeared
for the last twenty or thirty years of his life, living in
a womb-like darkness, watching movies all day (Ice Station
Zebra, 1968, was his favorite), sinking into paranoia,
attempting to use his unimaginable wealth as a political lever
and mostly failing. What is less well-remembered about Hughes
is that he led a wildly adventurous youth and early adulthood,
spearheading innovations in aviation, making and losing and
making fortunes, while in his spare time he infiltrated the
closed society of Hollywood, produced outrageous independent
films (such as the original Scarface, 1932), and
played house with some of the most famous actresses of the
‘30s and ‘40s.
Frankly,
the second half of Hughes’ life would make for a depressing,
ugly, and decidedly uncinematic evening at the movies, while
his early years are tailor made for an art form of light,
sound and movement. Scorsese, working from a smart script
by many different hands (see Notes), has fashioned a big movie
that is not so much biography in any traditional sense as
it is a joyful essay in what makes movies work. Young Howard
Hughes is merely the springboard for touching on a whole panoply
of Scorsesian themes: the fascinations of history, particularly
movie history; the pleasures and pitfalls of fame; the underbelly
of American dreaming, which includes towering impatience,
selfishness and arrogance; and most important, the terror
and loneliness that inevitably arises from being human.
You might
not think an entertaining movie could be made from such ingredients,
but you would be wrong. The Aviator is a visual feast,
packed with incidents and clever stunt casting, a movie-movie
about a guy with outsized dreams who made airplanes that were
either big as an oil tanker, or so streamlined they shattered
speed records, who jumped into the forward cockpits of swooping
biplanes so he could get the shot he wanted for his experiment
in action movies, and who freaked out if the peas weren’t
aligned just so on his dinner plate, who lived in a constant,
expanding fear of other people’s germs while his own
personal hygiene habits went straight to hell.
Young
Howard Hughes was a man of violent contradictions, living
and loving in a high-risk, often glamorous world; the surprise
would have been if his life had not made an entertaining movie.
Most likely, the real Hughes wasn’t quite as boyishly
charming as Leonardo DiCaprio, but so what? The historical
Richard III wasn’t an evil hunchback, either, but Shakespeare’s
version of him lives on because he touches upon other, essential
truths about power and corruption. Anyway, this isn’t
really a movie about Howard Hughes; it’s about what
it must have felt like to be Howard Hughes.
The
Aviator thrills, almost continuously, because Scorsese
has become a master of building bigger and bigger worlds on-screen
and immersing us in their physical details, of giving us the
grand overview of a time and place, then suddenly zooming
on the most important piece of information in a room, or a
life. Even his least successful films offer up startling scenes
and sequences that have no precedent in the movies, moments
that, like those found in other art forms at their best, show
us something we know to be true about the human animal, but
which no one has ever thought to put into a film before. The
Aviator is densely packed with such moments, overflowing
a bright, shiny package about having it all, and then failing
to handle having it all.
Since
it’s a Scorsese Picture, the acting is first-class from
the top down. Leonardo DiCaprio finally commandeers a role
that showcases the promise he revealed in This Boy’s
Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?
(both 1993), when he was still an unknown kid. His performance
as Hughes is a personal best, though it is anything but showy,
capturing many sides of the man with such deceptive ease,
most people probably won’t recognize it as acting. But
he is totally convincing, both as a smart young magnate at
the top of his game, and as a bewildered neurotic losing his
grip.
Everybody
talks about the brilliant Cate Blanchett’s turn as Katharine
Hepburn, the Hollywood legend who almost married Hughes, and
indeed, she does a stunning job in the film’s most difficult
role, concocting a dead-on impression of the Great One without
ever letting it become caricature. After the initial, shrewd
choices she makes to create the illusion, it’s the relationship
between Hepburn and Hughes that matters, Blanchett’s
technique becoming subsumed in the ensemble. Many other familiar
faces turn up, as a kind of old fashioned shorthand, performing
their own character specialties; we may not know who they’re
supposed to be, but it doesn’t matter because we believe
in their established personas: Alec Baldwin as a despicable
business rival (imagine that), Alan Alda as a cowardly sleaze-bag
of a Senator, Jude Law as the perilously handsome, morally
vacant Errol Flynn, Kate Beckinsale as the gorgeous and street
tough Ava Gardner.
But the
real star of The Aviator remains Martin Scorsese,
who came to the project at DiCaprio’s urging and made
it his own, infusing it with his irrepressible energy, his
encyclopedic knowledge of film technique, and his lifelong
dedication to understanding obsession. You will not see another
film this year that is more beautifully photographed and edited,
or that uses these tools with such flourish and power to achieve
its dramatic ends. Nor are you likely to come across another
film that balances epic scale with the personal more effectively,
or that manages such haunting poignancy in the study of a
truly screwed-up Famous Man. As with many of the director’s
finest films, The Aviator runs the gamut from exuberance
to despair, and leaves us with the distinct impression that
Scorsese, most of all, has been there many times and knows
what he’s talking about.
Notes:
“WRITTEN
BY”: on-screen credit for the script of The Aviator
asserts that the film was “written by” John Logan,
but this is largely because Logan’s contract states
that he gets sole credit.
The fact
is, several writers worked on multiple versions of the script,
over a period of a dozen years, including contributions by
one of the film’s producers, writer-director Michael
Mann (this year’s Collateral). Several writers
have challenged Logan’s claims in court, on other films
as well as The Aviator, and while the truth of such
Hollywood squabbles is never fully revealed until the participants
are either dead or forcibly retired, it’s unlikely that
every word which made it into the film was Mr. Logan’s
invention alone, not with this movie’s stellar mixture
of ego and talent.
HIS NEW
DE NIRO?: Once identified almost exclusively with Robert De
Niro, Scorsese now seems to be hooking up creatively with
DiCaprio on a regular basis, which is at least good for business.
The director’s next film will be another collaboration
with Leo, and Matt Damon: The Departed, a remake
of the Hong Kong crime melodrama Infernal Affairs
(2002).
The irony:
De Niro picked DiCaprio for This Boy’s Life,
freeing him from the less prestigious life of sitcom television
(not that De Niro has had trouble finding work the last ten
years).
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