Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

Film review

'Aviator' is a bumpy flight

The amazing tale of Howard Hughes gets short shrift in many ways - including the miscasting of Leo - but Martin Scorsese still has crafted a film worth paying attention to.

By STEVE PERSALL
Published December 23, 2004

	[Miramax Films] Could young Leonardo DiCaprio possibly carry a film about the life of Howard Hughes? Perhaps that’s why The Aviator cannot possibly include the Hollywood legend’s latter years.

After rugged actors Tommy Lee Jones and Jason Robards portrayed legendary Howard Hughes, it's off-putting to watch fresh-faced Leonardo DiCaprio take the role in The Aviator. He simply doesn't project the toughness, even preternaturally, of someone who battled his way to success. The kid stays in the way of the picture.

Hughes was a forceful master of industry, but DiCaprio looks and sounds like a petulant summer intern. True, the film focuses on Hughes' early successes and failures in aviation and movies; we never see anything about his Las Vegas and military industrial complex connections and only a flash of him as the world's most famous, and grubbiest, recluse. We don't even get title cards at the end to tell us what happened 30 years hence. The movie just stops, perhaps realizing that little has been presented to suggest that a future is possible.

DiCaprio's casting is one of the few mistakes director Martin Scorsese makes with The Aviator, but it's enough to make such an impressively mounted project seem disappointing. Scorsese's attention to period detail is impeccable, as usual. He still stages grand sequences - a Cocoanut Grove wingding and Hughes' amazing flight adventures - with the eager ambition of an artist who doesn't know if he'll work again.

We get the feeling that Scorsese didn't take this job to illuminate a shadowy icon but to indulge himself and film buffs by re-creating storied Hollywood events. The movie is its best when Scorsese giddily stages circumstances surrounding Hughes' first production, Hell's Angels, the Titanic of its day, costing so much money and time that it was expected to flop. (Could that be the DiCaprio connection?)

Scorsese also dips into computer-generated filmmaking more than before, a way to duplicate dogfight scenes demanded by Hughes, who bought a private air force and risked lives, including his. Hughes' imaginative aircraft designs result in two spectacular crash sequences. It's no surprise that Scorsese nails this new technology; there isn't much he can't master from behind the camera. It's the flesh and blood aspects of The Aviator that don't soar.

On the ground, Hughes is a flirt who abruptly hits on Katharine Hepburn, played by Cate Blanchett with uncanny vocal and physical mimicry. When she's onscreen, the movie gains some emotional footing. There's too much name-dropping (Errol Flynn, Jane Russell, Jack Warner, etc.) to cover for Blanchett to stay long. We get repetitive scenes of Hughes' adviser Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) telling his boss the money's running out. Alec Baldwin pops in and out as Hughes' airline nemesis, Juan Trippe, and Kate Beckinsale does the same as Ava Gardner.

The meatiest support comes from Alan Alda as a shifty politician Hughes challenges in a dramatic congressional hearing.

Then there's screenwriter John Logan's clumsy handling of Hughes' germ phobia, all nervous tics and panic attacks in restrooms. DiCaprio gets to stiffen with nervousness about lapel lint and get stuck in Rain Man-style verbal loops. Everybody around Hughes just plays along without much comment. A scene in which Alda's character uses Hughes' compulsive behavior against him is a rare, rewarding exception.

In the end, we get the idea that Howard Hughes made a few sensational movies, dated a lot of movie stars, liked to fly and washed his hands too much. Robards dug deeper into the tycoon's psyche in 10 minutes of Melvin and Howard. Scorsese's film and Hughes' legendary Spruce Goose aircraft have much in common: They're both impressively enormous but never carry valuable freight.

Grade: B

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, John C. Reilly, Kate Beckinsale, Alan Alda, Ian Holm, Danny Huston

Screenplay: John Logan

Rating: PG-13; profanity, violence, sensuality, mature themes

Running time: 169 min.

[Last modified February 16, 2005, 05:37:58]