director
Martin Scorsese
screenwriter
John Logan
producers
Sandy Climan
Charles Evans Jr.
Graham King
Michael Mann
cinematographer
Robert Richardson
music
Howard Shore
editor
Thelma Schoonmaker
cast
Leonardo DiCaprio (Howard Hughes)
Cate Blanchett (Katharine Hepburn)
Kate Beckinsale (Ava Gardner)
John C. Reilly (Noah Dietrich)
Alec Baldwin (Juan Trippe)
Alan Alda (Sen. Brewster)
Ian Holm (Professor Fitz)
Danny Huston (Jack Frye)
Gwen Stefani (Jean Harlow)
Jude Law (Errol Flynn)
Frances Conroy (Mrs. Hepburn)
Brent Spiner (Robert Gross)
Willem Dafoe (Roland Sweet)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 169m
u.s.
release: 12/25/04
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other martin
scorsese films
reviewed on this website:
- bringing
out the dead
- casino
- gangs
of new york
- kundun
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Some directors are drawn to
obsessive heroes who sink everything into their dreams or goals;
the heroes are usually onscreen surrogates for the directors.
Steven Spielberg had Schindler's
List, Francis Coppola had Tucker: The Man and
His Dream, Michael Cimino hungered for years to make
a movie version of The Fountainhead. Martin Scorsese's
The Aviator fits snugly into this category. Scorsese,
perhaps cinema's greatest living obsessive-compulsive director
now that Stanley Kubrick is dead, is a natural match for Howard
Hughes, the billionaire crackpot and/or visionary (depending
on your view). Hughes lived every filmmaker's dream, pouring
unprecedented thousands of his own cash into the flying epic
Hell's Angels, escorting ladies like Ava Gardner
and Katharine Hepburn to premieres, and focusing relentlessly
on his fantasy -- to build the best airplanes ever -- even when
everyone else thinks he's nuts.
Leonardo DiCaprio seems to
have become for Scorsese what Tom Hanks has become for Spielberg
-- a go-to guy for dependable charisma (DiCaprio is signed on
for Scorsese's next film as well). As Howard Hughes, DiCaprio
is allowed to hit far more notes than he did as the sullen lead
in Scorsese's Gangs
of New York. His Howard is a go-getter, a man
who responds to a roadblock by throwing money at it. Yet all
his riches can't insulate him from his inner demons -- his terror
of germs, instilled in him (or so John Logan's script has it)
by his mother. Gradually over the course of the movie's two hours
and forty-nine minutes (which streak by until the somewhat talky
finale), DiCaprio shows us the dark side of obsessiveness, the
habitual hand-washing, the jars of urine lined up neatly.
This is a jittery epic, always
on the move; its energy matches Howard's, and when he meets Katharine
Hepburn we can see why they click so well and why they don't
last together -- Cate Blanchett nails Hepburn's haughty nervous
energy, which we see is a cover for her insecurity around her
pompously intellectual Connecticut family. (You can also understand
why she eventually gave her heart to the gruff, amiable pillow
Spencer Tracy, who was able to calm her down.) The movie's Howard
loves to achieve, but dislikes the limelight; he'd much rather
be up in the cockpit of one of his planes, breaking a speed record
or cranking his own camera during the shooting of a dogfight
scene in Hell's Angels. Scorsese's admiration for
Hughes is palpable -- here's a guy who got up in a plane and
shot his own footage for the picture he was producing.
The Aviator bogs down a bit when it gets into
the conflict between Hughes' TWA and the rival Pan Am, run by
a pipe-puffing Alec Baldwin with devious senator Alan Alda in
his pocket. Howard is crucified in the press for spending wartime
money on planes that wouldn't fly, leading to a rather dry hearing
in which Howard practically produces a pie chart and pointer
to defend himself. The movie's populist theme is that the corrupt
rich guys are trying to stomp the little guy -- some little guy!
Hughes was a millionaire at age eighteen, inheriting his father's
oil drill company that afforded him $2 million a year. We don't
really care whether Howard's name is smeared in the papers; we
care more about whether he can beat down his germophobia long
enough to make himself presentable. In short, his inner conflict
is a lot more compelling than two guys being mean to him.
This is Scorsese's most engaged
and engaging filmmaking in a while; it feels like an epic without
strain. As soon as the first nightclub scene hits the screen,
you know Scorsese is in an enchanted milieu -- big-band music,
movie stars milling about (Jude Law contributes a fun few minutes
as Errol Flynn, who of course gets into a fight). The Aviator
is a tribute to Hollywood and an outsider who wanted to be part
of it, but whose vision was grander than Hollywood. It ends on
a note of triumph, ignoring Hughes' final hermetic decades (Jonathan
Demme's Melvin and Howard, in which Hughes turns up in
the desert and leaves millions of dollars to a gas-station owner,
would be a good follow-up to The Aviator). But Scorsese
has made the movie he wanted, about the hero whose story he wanted
to tell.
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