AS GOOD AS HUGHES GETS
With 'The Aviator,' Scorsese makes sense of a millionaire's crazy life
By Andy Klein
With 'The Aviator,' Scorsese makes sense of a millionaire's crazy life
As subject matter, the life of Howard Hughes has frustrated any number of directors. Martin Scorsese's approach in The Aviator, from John Logan's script, gives us what is probably as satisfying a result as we'll ever get.
There are multiple problems in addressing Hughes's story. For starters, in his 20s, 30s, and early 40s, his life was almost too full of incident to be believed. Worse yet, his final 25 years were - by choice - almost entirely devoid of incident ... were, in fact, a colossal downer. This is a tale that might play better in reverse.
So Logan and Scorsese do the most reasonable thing: With the exception of a brief intro scene of Hughes as a child, they start in the late 1920s, as Hughes is struggling to make Hell's Angels, the massively expensive World War I epic he produced and directed. They end with dual triumphs: He successfully defies a politically motivated Senate investigation, and he gets the gargantuan Hercules (a.k.a. the Spruce Goose) into the air, however briefly.
The danger with this approach is that its omissions could amount to such a whitewash of the reality as to be a sheer lie. The filmmakers have cleverly stressed the signs of Hughes's psychological unraveling, so as to set up the truth of those years without making us endure them at the end.
The opening has Hughes, at eight, being warned by his mother about germs and disease, setting up the form in which his later madness manifested itself. (By all reports, this is true.) We zip ahead to 1927, as Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), all of 21 years old, is in the midst of making Hell's Angels. Little bits of exposition fill us in on how he got there: His father's Texas tool company marketed the world's best drill bit for oil wells; Hughes inherited the company when he was 18; got himself legally declared an adult days after his 19th birthday so he could control the firm; headed to Hollywood to get into both movies and movie actresses.
In very abbreviated form, we see how his perfectionism - already so intense as to be part of his pathology - caused Hell's Angels to be the most expensive film of its time. Two years of shooting - including long periods of waiting for the right weather to shoot the aerial dogfight sequences - meant that, in the duration, talkies had made silent films passé. He needed additional time to completely reshoot the non-action scenes for sound. When released in 1930, the film was a critical and commercial smash, though not enough to put it into profit. (It still has a pretty strong critical reputation.)
With that out of the way, Hughes indulges his two other great loves: flying and nookie. (Freud would have had a field day with that.) He sets several flying records; and he dates one actress after another. One of his longer affairs is with Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett); nonetheless, the film concentrates on her more than the actual story warrants, probably because she's a more interesting character than Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner).
About halfway through the movie's two hours and fifty minutes, after the breakup with Hepburn, Hughes's sexual exploits get crowded out of the story by his aviation ambitions and business troubles, as well as by his increasing instability. We get little flashes of his affairs with Ava Gardner (a lovely but direly miscast Kate Beckinsale) and Domergue, but we get a lot more of his battles with Pan Am chief Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) and Trippe's bought senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda).
Beckinsale aside, most of the casting is good, but there are a couple of problems overall. First of all, there is the distraction of celebrity casting - primarily Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow. I mean: Why? (Stefani - on screen for maybe 60 seconds - gets higher billing than John C. Reilly, who - as longtime Hughes business manager Noah Dietrich - has the second or third largest part in the movie. Note to John: Talk to your agent.) Baldwin is fine as Trippe, but, in introducing the character, Scorsese uses what feels like a cheap and distracting trick: We see him from behind and hear his voice; then the camera moves around to reveal, hey look!, it's Alec Baldwin. Scorsese may not have intended the moment to be cute, but that's how it comes across, and for a few moments we are pulled out of the film's otherwise absorbing reality. (In my audience, there was laughter.)
Blanchett faces a different, almost impossible, problem. Not enough people remember Jean Harlow's distinctive voice to make it crucial for Stefani to imitate her elocution perfectly; but everybody knows Hepburn's voice. The actress has the choice of not sounding enough like the real Hepburn ... or sounding too much like her. To my ears, Blanchett's accent sounds close enough, but, because of our familiarity with Hepburn, it cannot help but feel like an exercise in the Rich Little/Fred Travalena school of acting. It's to Blanchett's credit that the effect eventually wears off.
Of course, DiCaprio is on camera more than everyone else put together. He does a remarkable job, but his wispy boyishness remains a problem. Yes, he's at least five years older than the character is supposed to be in the earliest Hollywood scenes; but Hughes - himself a lifelong beanpole, noted for being "boyish" - looked more like a grownup at 21 than DiCaprio will at 50. As with Blanchett's accent, you eventually come to accept his babyface as the face of Hughes, but ... there's still something unsettling about the disparity. (It's interesting to compare newsreel footage of Hughes testifying before Congress with Scorsese's re-creation of the event; it makes you aware of how much DiCaprio looks like a high school kid in daddy's suit.) Tommy Lee Jones, who played Hughes in a '70s TV movie, is physically closer to the mark.
It is not a slight to DiCaprio's performance to say that, from early on, I was sitting there cursing the fact that Warren Beatty never got around to the Hughes project he worked on years ago; Beatty was born to play Hughes in so many ways that I doubt anyone will ever match my imagining of what could have been.
Scorsese will take some knocks for making such a "non-Scorsese" project, which happens every time he does something that doesn't involve contemporary urban crooks and nutjobs. But The Aviator does have some central similarities to that most Scorsese-esque film, Raging Bull. Both involve men of ruthless ambition, obsessed with proving they are somebodies. (Hughes had to live down his reputation as a spoiled, dilettante/rich kid.)
But I also think it's time (or due past time) we put aside this notion of "Scorsese's kind of material." He hasn't visited that milieu since Casino, nearly a decade ago. And, if all his films were of that subgenre, people would complain that he was stuck in a rut, just trying to recapture the glory days of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, a one-note filmmaker. All through The Aviator, there are sequences that remind us of how great a director he is; Hughes's big plane crash - in the middle of Beverly Hills, no less - perfectly captures the adrenaline-fueled hyperreality of being caught in an irreversible disaster.Published: 12/16/2004
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