A movie about a man's OCD. Period

Rating: 1/10 (15 February 2005)

Suppose Martin Scorsese made a biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt which consisted of three hours of discussion of his affair with Lucy Mercer and his Polio induced disability with only slight attention paid to the Great Depression or WWII. Better yet, suppose the movie ended just after FDR's third inauguration with a Republican foe, played by Alec Baldwin, rising and in two or three sentences, acknowledging defeat and predicting that FDR would end the depression and rid Europe of Nazism and Fascism, making it safe for Socialism.
Substitute Howard Hughes for FDR and change paralysis to OCD and you have, "The Aviator." Scorsese's thesis is that everything Hughes did was the result of an obsession or compulsion. Hughes compulsively chases (and catches) every beautiful Hollywood actress in the 1930's and 40's. Meanwhile, his obsession with airplanes and perfection drives him to design innovative aircraft that enable him to be the first man to circumnavigate the globe in four days and set new air speed records. We are shown a seemingly endless scene (one of many) in which he is trapped in a men's room because he is so obsessed with germs that he is afraid to touch the doorknob. Strangely, this fear of germs doesn't seem to prevent him from touching the private parts of female movie stars. (It should be noted that Hughes's biographers rarely if ever mention his disorder as occurring prior to the late 1950's.) As if in answer to my most fervent prayers, the movie finally concludes in a 1947 scene (after Hughes has defeated the U. S. Senate and several couples have left the theater, but before he has established his business empire) by having Alec Baldwin, as the head of Pan Am, predict Hughes's accomplishments in the 50's and 60's (which should have been shown in scenes replacing those of catch me, catch me with starlets and Hughes suffering from the OCD he had not yet acquired).
Cate Blanchett, currently the best actress in Hollywood, is outstanding as Kate Hepburne. Leo DeCaprio is not credible as a giant like Howard Hughes. He isn't helped by having to spend the duration of the movie displaying a facial expression which seems to say, "I have to find a men's room, fast." For this atrocity, Scorsese should be exiled to movie hell in Northern Minnesota making movies about female iron workers filing sexual harassment law suits.