A Biopic About a Very Brilliant But Very Disturbed Man

Rating: 9/10 (27 December 2004)

Hollywood loves biopics and, judging from past and recent history, the more whacked-out the subject the more resources go into the film. It doesn't matter if the average moviegoer knows anything about the spotlighted character (as in "A Brilliant Mind," how many knew about that Nobel Prize-winning genius?). Actually it may be an advantage to not sit there comparing recollected reality with silver screen confabulation.
In any event I doubt many people under sixty know much about rich inventor-cum-movie producer and director Howard Hughes. Hughes shifted gears from a fulsome dose of Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder (OCD) to full-blown madness decades before death released him from an affluent but miserable life.
Martin Scorsese is massively fascinated by Hughes and his sprawling film is a testament to the man's brilliance as well as his descent into tragically isolated insanity. Having cast Leonardo DiCaprio in the much overpraised "Gangs of New York," he recruited this versatile actor, who owes his preeminence in Tinseltown to the runaway success of "Titanic," to portray Hughes from his mid-1920s life as producer/director of the uber-over budget World War I aerial combat flick, "Hell's Angels," to the late Forties.
As portrayed by DiCaprio, Hughes was a driven perfectionist. Nothing wrong with that in a surgeon but with a movie production there's a time to wrap it up and Hughes took years to reach that point. His obsession with detail, well reflected by DiCaprio, was simply an early and useful mirror of his increasingly handicapping OCD.
That movie's success brought gorgeous women flocking to his side but the most interesting liaison was with rising star Katharine Hepburn. Cate Blanchett inhabits Hepburn, a risky role when so many both remember the recently deceased icon and were mesmerized by her out-sized, bigger than life personality. Well Blanchett did it - no surprise. She inhaled Hepburn's clipped, staccato speech and her mannerisms, not all of which were always gentle or kind, even to loved ones. An Oscar nomination, I hope, will follow.
Hughes, an experienced but often reckless pilot, germinated ideas for novel aircraft design and he had the sense, the judgment to recruit the best minds to translate his concepts into operational models. Much of "The Aviator" focuses on Hughes's drive to produce the fastest planes and the biggest for the military. DiCaprio's Hughes balances ambitious plans well laid out with the creeping advent of uncontrollable mental illness. Closeups show a Hughes who knows something is going rather wrong but he hasn't the ability to fight it (or the shrinks).
As Hughes's lover Ava Gardner, Kate Beckinsale is very grown up and convincing. She's a versatile actress and she proves it again here.
The denouement of Hughes's public life was a vicious scandal engineered by Pan Am's Juan Trippe (a smooth, venal Alec Baldwin) who controlled Maine's Senator Ralph Owen Brewster (a not as nice as we usually expect him to be Alan Alda). Trippe coveted a monopoly for international flights for Pan Am (anyone see a Pan Am plane lately?) and Hughes's TWA was an obstacle that had to be neutralized by law or acquired by coerced sale.
The Senate hearing is over dramatized but it reflects a dirty world of false accusations and behind the scenes chicanery that, I understand, actually occurs from time to time. Shocking.
Perhaps Hughes's greatest gift to mankind was not his into the air briefly only once, eight-engine Spruce Goose, but his getting Jane Russell in "The Outlaw" to the screen past the censors. Many male libidos owed much to that film's release. But the men who couldn't bare to have Russell's ample cleavage on big screens held up the movie's release for SIX years. Awful!
Jude Law who is in nearly every movie these days shows up as Errol Flynn. A forgettable performance.
DiCaprio, Blanchett, Beckinsale, Alda and Baldwin make a good team with a master director, Scorsese. Wonder what's next?
Good use is made of period newsreels and the score helps keep the dialog moving nicely.
9/10