WhatzUp

The Aviator
by Derek Neff

What I knew about Hughes before watching The Aviator was this: (a) he was an eccentric recluse who grew his fingernails way too long; (b) he once designed a very large wooden plane nicknamed the Spruce Goose; and (c) he was very, very rich. It’s not exactly enough to inspire one to run out to see a movie based on his life, but then again I’m not exactly a walking encyclopedia, and this isn’t just any movie. This is a Martin Scorcese movie, for cryin’ out loud, and that’s a fact that’s kind of hard to ignore. Before Raging Bull, I didn’t really care about boxing champ Jake LaMotta, either, but that doesn’t stop me now from naming it as arguably the greatest of all biopics.

The Aviator is a never-dull (and often surprisingly fascinating) account of Hughes’ life from the late 1920s, when he was struggling to make the WWI airplane picture Hell’s Angel - the most expensive movie ever made up to that time - to the late 1940s, when the Spruce Goose was completed. I would say it contains everything in between, but a cursory reading of the entry on Hughes in my handy-dandy encyclopedia says otherwise. (Why did Scorcese choose not to dramatize Hughes’ record-breaking 91-hour flight around the world, for instance?) However, we do see plentiful precursors to Hughes’ gradual descent into mental illness, and we learn an awful lot about his affair with Katharine Hepburn (played with great brio and flinty wit by Cate Blanchett).

Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio, looking uncannily like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane) exemplifies the mythical get-it-done-at-any-cost monomania now considered a minimal requirement for corporate CEOs everywhere. I’ve had one or two bosses who have flattered themselves into thinking they were as tough, unreasonable, brilliant, and ambitious as someone like Hughes, but Hughes makes even Donald Trump look like a novice.

I loved The Aviator. It’s a loud, rambunctious, beautiful, fascinating, sexy, disturbing ride. It approaches three hours in length, but it doesn’t feel a second too long; the film never takes on excessive weight, never plods, never drags. Half a dozen scenes are destined to become classics, and not just the scenes - alternately invigorating and horrifying - in the planes. Has any other recent American picture displayed such wit as in the scene in which Hughes

goes with Hepburn to eat dinner at her rich Connecticut parents’ table? We have surely seen many movies that attempt to recreate famous dance clubs of the 1930s, but has it ever been done so well as the scene set inside the Coconut Grove club? More insightful and thorough movies about mental illness have been made, but how many have managed to convey half so concisely the queasy mixture of self-loathing and disgust on Hughes’ face as when he refuses to hand a clean towel to another man in the washroom?

Let’s talk about these airplane scenes. One shows Hughes himself filming a battle scene in Hell’s Angels, his head sticking out of the plane, camera in hand, as dozens and dozens of bi-planes circle dizzyingly all around him. Another shows Hughes breaking a world speed record in a plane of his own design and then making a crash landing in a beet field after the plane runs out of fuel. But the centerpiece of the film is certainly the one in which Hughes test flies a new spy plane over L.A. (If you’ve seen the movie then you certainly know the one I’m talking about; if you haven’t, you’ll just have to go and watch it, now won’t you?) They are all amazing; CGI effects have never been so well-integrated into a movie, and have rarely been put to such effective use.

Having said all of this, The Aviator lacks the idiosyncratic verve of Scorcese’s more personal movies, movies like Taxi Driver or AfterHours or even Gangs of New York, which I disliked, though the inimitable Scorcese touch was all over it. I can think of half a dozen living directors who could have made The Aviator just as well, provided they were also working from John Logan’s efficient and lucid screenplay. This is not to say that Scorcese has lost his skills as a director; he most assuredly hasn’t. It”’ only to say that this movie doesn’t bear the earmarks of a one-of-a-kind auteur.

This movie is certainly much, much better than Scorcese’s previous effort, Gangs of New York. Like Gangs, The Aviator is a period piece, but it has more in common with the easy, off-hand elegance of Scorcese’s old-New York romance The Age of Innocence than with the “look-at-me” artifice of Gangs. (As I write this, I’m reminded again of the unpretentious virtuosity of several scenes in The Aviator, and I am impressed anew.)

The movie heavily references Welles’ unimpeachable Citizen Kane, and it does so at its own peril. I was sort of missing the one binding thread - the “Rosebud,” if you will - of The Aviator, and I came up (more or less) empty-handed. We never really know what makes Charles Foster Kane tick, but the unknowability of Kane to those in his life is sort of the point of Citizen Kane. We never know what makes Hughes tick, either, but I can’t help but feel we are supposed to lose sight of this in all the excitement. This keeps The Aviator from rising to true greatness, but it comes so close we are still sort of gasping for air after it’s over.