Release Date: December 17, 2004
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Kate Beckinsale, Alan Alda
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: John Logan
Distributed by: Miramax Films
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (thematic elements, sexual content, nudity, language, a crash sequence)
If you want to understand why everyone has such high regard for Martin Scorsese, one good place to start would be with The Aviator, his entertaining, nuanced biopic about the millionaire filmmaker and aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. Most directors would see in Hughes a supremely tragic person, whose bright, early years in Hollywood and in the aviation industry were overshadowed by his decline into dementia, drug addiction, and seclusion. Scorsese, however, has chosen to focus almost exclusively on the young Hughes, thereby relieving the film of one of the greatest constraints of the biographical genre: the tendency to reduce the life of its main character to his or her one great struggle.
Some will say that this was because Hughes defied such limits -- he was, to say it plainly, a man of many struggles. But it is also possible that Scorsese chose to exercise an extraordinarily un-Scorsesean bit of sympathy when it came to Hughes. Hughes’s successes in the aviation industry were the product of a singular, ceaseless vision of the future (underscored in the movie’s last scene), something that not even his greatest competitor, Juan Trippe, the shrewd and ruthless president of Pan American Airways, could lay claim to having. He was the aviator of his time, and because of him, commercial aviation is vastly different today. And yet the later years are irrelevant to Scorsese, which is strange because Scorsese is a filmmaker who is notorious for a unflinchingly realistic view of the world. Oftentimes bad things happen undeservingly to good people in his movies, but except for a few scenes that highlight Hughes’s dementia in its early stages -- he would often keep himself locked in darkened rooms, letting his hair and fingernails grow and storing his urine in scores of empty milk bottles -- Hughes gets a pass.
The question is why. It seems almost too convenient to say that Hughes reminds Scorsese of his younger self, a passionate, maverick filmmaker whose goal, from the start, was probably to revolutionize Hollywood. At the least there are elements of a typical Scorsesean hero in Hughes: he is the prototypical compulsive genius (the scene in which he orders his chocolate chip cookies made a certain way is just like the scene in Casino when the Robert De Niro character, Ace Rothstein, starts counting the blueberries in the muffins served at his casino’s restaurant) who winds up with less than what he started with. But it is fairly obvious that Scorsese is in love with Hughes’s passion, even if it was (by this film’s design) more for aviation than it was for filmmaking.
As the movie begins, for instance, Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) is filming his famous 1930 war epic, Hell’s Angels, which took three years to make (two for the original shoot, as a silent film, and another year when Hughes re-made it as a sound film), but his biggest concern is not about moviemaking -- though Scorsese, working from a solid script by John Logan, does include the famous Hughes anecdote in which he asked the head of MGM to loan him two extra cameras on top of the 24 he already had -- but the realism of the climactic dogfight. How to convey the sensation of speed in flight? Such forward-thinking questions drove Hughes his entire life, as the movie follows him from Hollywood, where he romanced movie stars like Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett, in a standout performance that seems like parody but is probably more accurate than we know) and later Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), to the aviation industry, where, during the war years, he built planes that set air-speed records, like the XF-11 spy plane, and size records, like the 150-ton “Spruce Goose” transport, and, after the war, he threw himself into commercial aviation, taking his TWA airline up against Juan Trippe’s Pan Am, then the only American carrier that flew international routes.
It almost goes without saying that Hughes is a demanding role, but DiCaprio is surprisingly equal to the task. If this film is any indication, Scorsese has done the unthinkable: He has turned the heartthrob into an actor. (For Scorsese’s part, it’s worth wondering whether his working relationship with DiCaprio -- this is their second film together, and there is at least one more on the way -- will have the same effect as the eight movies he made with Robert De Niro, which are largely to credit for the De Niro screen identity we know today.) This is quite a cast for DiCaprio to excel in, too, because no sooner has he proven himself equal to one veteran actor than another one appears to share the screen with him. Indeed, the film rations its stars like tap water in the middle of a serious drought, but it produces the effect Scorsese was undoubtedly after: Look, it’s Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn! It’s Alec Baldwin as Juan Trippe! It’s Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner! And is that Jude Law as Errol Flynn? Scorsese wants us to be wowed by these stars in these roles because the people they play would have induced the same response to moviegoers 70 years ago.
But all of Scorsese’s monkeying and manipulating aside, Hughes’s incredible lifestyle is what makes him so film-worthy. Unlike other contemporary biopics, which all seem to emphasize the quaint nature of the times before the hero comes along and revolutionizes things by telling everyone what we take for granted today, The Aviator knows that Hughes’s accomplishments are just as spectacular now as they were then. One of the film’s last sequences involves Hughes’s work with the Spruce Goose, an enormous aircraft that seems like it had no more than a snowball’s chance in hell of getting airborne. Even though the science of aviation has improved by several orders of magnitude since 1947, when Hughes piloted the Goose in its one and only test flight, it would still be an extraordinary thing to see the aircraft lumbering aloft under the terrific power of its eight turboprop engines today. There was nothing quaint about Howard Hughes.
There is a dark underbelly to that sentiment, and you begin to see it as Hughes becomes more reclusive in the movie’s second and third acts. Here Scorsese prefers the framework that served him well in Taxi Driver, the hero’s slow descent into madness. Both movies wind up in the same place, an ambiguous middle ground somewhere between redemption and self-destruction -- just as Travis Bickle was celebrated as a hero for killing all of the pimps and drug dealers in the climactic shootout in Taxi Driver, so does Howard Hughes get his revenge on Juan Trippe and his government crony, Senator Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), Republican of Maine. Many people will point to the Senate hearings at the end, when Hughes, who was under investigation by the federal government, turns the table on Brewster by exposing his close relationship with Trippe, but one of the movie’s best scenes actually comes before that, when Brewster attempts to unnerve Hughes during a private meeting beforehand. Knowing Hughes’s compulsive cleanliness, Brewster serves him a lunch of raw fish and even puts a greasy thumbprint on Hughes’s drinking glass. But Hughes, with visible effort, chokes down the food and drinks his water, persevering; ultimately, Scorsese wants you to know, his passion for aviation trumped any personal debilitations. And yet. And yet. The movie’s very last scene has Hughes slipping into something darker, giving The Aviator the quintessential Scorsesean ambiguity.
Now of course The Aviator is Scorsese’s idealized vision of Hughes, and, being a movie, it eliminates some parts of the truth and sensationalizes others. But biopics will do that, and Scorsese is not pretending to have taken an oath before making this movie to tell the whole truth and nothing but. This is why we watch these films, and this one in particular. Not to see the Howard Hughes story, because we know the end of that before it even begins -- Hughes died in 1976; Hell’s Angels eventually turned a profit; and TWA vastly outperformed Pan Am before it merged with American Airlines -- but to understand what it was that drew Scorsese to Hughes in the first place. Some part of the director said, there’s an awfully good movie to be made about Howard Hughes, and having seen The Aviator, I know what it is: The part of Scorsese, whom many have called the greatest living filmmaker, that identified with Hughes’s unparalleled passion for doing things faster, quicker, better. His passion for being the best.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)