**** (out of ****)
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, John C. Reilly, Alec Baldwin, Kate Beckinsale, Alan Alda, and Ian Holm
Directed by Martin Scorsese & written by John Logan
2004
166 min PG13
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2004
Holy crap I loved “The Aviator.” I loved every second of it. Well, maybe I didn’t much enjoy the part when the guy caught on fire but, wow, is it a blast.
There’s a lot of “Citizen Kane” in “The Aviator.” Orson Welles’s original title for “Kane” was “The American.” Similarly, director Martin Scorsese and writer John Logan present their protagonist—obsessive-compulsive aviator/filmmaker/millionaire Howard Hughes—as the ultimate American. Our desire to dominate and change our world is what separates us from animals, and we Yanks excel at making our surroundings into our bitch. In the life of Hughes, Scorsese sees this desire assuming four faces: technology, fanatical cleanliness, wealth, and filmmaking, which is the creation of an alternate, pet reality that we can dominate when the real one is being stubborn. The ultimate end of mankind’s pursuits is the elimination of everything that bothers or inconveniences us. Not just every physical inconvenience, but every ideological one as well. Through technology and affluence, we get step-by-step closer to perfectly hermetic and sealed existences, placated by television and the internet, where we don’t have to share anything with anyone—least of all what they think.
When we think of our gated communities with our sealed-off, immaculate houses, watching television and even news that does nothing but confirm what we already want to know, and no longer having to deal with anyone else’s opinions, aren’t we in fact living out Hughes’s dream, in miniature? Certainly Hughes used the world as his canvas and not just the womb-like warmth of a house. But he did retreat to his private space where he could lay around naked with a film projector (TV?) continually running HIS movies, drinking nothing but milk and daydreaming about breasts, like some great child still hungering for mommy to take care of him. This may well be what Scorsese has in mind as the picture ends with Hughes muttering “the way of the future” over and over again.
But Hughes is all that is good about America, too. He is ambitious, talented, quite possibly a genius, and willing to take enormous risks with his own fortunes not just for his own satisfaction but because he’s convinced the world needs faster and faster aircraft. When he takes on corruption in the federal government, he is the kind of vigilante citizen that the signers of the Constitution had in mind. And, like our Puritan forefathers, he doesn’t drink.
But to get back to my comparison to “Citizen Kane,” “The Aviator” also looks a fair share like Welles’s masterpiece. Some shots seem to be direct quotes; we know the president of Pan Am is going to be Hughes’s nemesis because he towers over us in his first appearance, shot low like Charlie Kane. But mostly Scorsese shares Welles’s love of whipping his audience into grins simply through miraculous camera movements. Scorsese, ever the virtuoso, weaves us through Gatsby-esque parties, in and out of the bandstand and the dance floor. He’s even better in the sky: one nearly miraculous shot flies us through a staged dogfight in Hughes’s film “Hells Angels.” Fokkers and Sopwith Camels whirl around us like the population of an angered hornet’s nest, while Hughes comes straight at us in a special plane adorned with cameras, barking commands and making hand signs even as he risks crashing.
Nary a single plane in the film, aside from those parked on runways, aren’t computer-generated. Instead of trying to pass effects off for reality, “The Aviator” has an orange, vaguely sepia look throughout that reconciles real people with computer planes into a single, heightened reality. It’s a glossy, artificial look, not at all like Scorsese’s gritty early works like “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver.” That’s because he sees something glossy, operatic, and surreal in Hughes’s life, just like in “Gangs of New York.” Scorsese also mirrors Hughes desire for an “eveything-in-its-place” world by beginning many scenes with figures framed in the perfect center.
“The Aviator” follows Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) from the 1920s to the end of the ‘40s. John Logan’s screenplay weaves Hughes four great loves—technology, wealth, cleaniliness, and the movies—into different sides of the same longing. We see Hughes weeping at a screening of “Hell’s Angels,” yes because it is a powerful and sincere film, but it is also his, it’s his baby, he made it. (Hughes tangle with critics over the stratospheric budget of “Hell’s Angels” seems to be Scorsese’s defense for lavish and meaningful films.) His love of technology reaches its zenith in the creation of the Spruce Moose, still the largest airplane ever built. He buys up TWA on a whim, without consideration for where it will lead him, and he ends in a senate hearing as a war profiteer. We can’t quite call him a war profiteer, or much of anything, except a man who doesn’t even notice anything that isn’t directly related to his projects. Far from a miser, his millions are always a means to an end, and he tosses them around on his adventures and legal woes indifferently. There are plenty of women is his life, but never a mate. The girls who aren’t sexual playthings end up being mother figures.
Page two of "The Aviator" (2004). Back to home.