All About Howard Hughes

Rating: 9/10 (10 January 2012)

Martin Scorsese directed this fast-moving, epic-scale biopic documenting the life and loves one of the most colorful Americans of the 20th century, Howard Hughes.The Aviator is a biographical drama film directed by Scorsese, written by John Logan, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio together with together with Cate Blanchett,Alan Alda,Alec Baldwin,Kate Beckinsale,John C. Reilly,Gwen Stefani and Jude Law. It is the story of aviation pioneer Howard Hughes, drawn largely upon numerous sources including a biography by Charles Higham.The film centers on Hughes' life from the late 1920s to 1947, during which time he became a successful film producer and an aviation magnate while simultaneously growing more unstable due to severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The Aviator follows Hughes as the twenty-something millionaire, having already made a fortune improving the design of oil-drilling bits, comes to Hollywood with an interest in getting into the picture business. It doesn't take long for Hughes, with his passion for airplanes, to jump from producer to director of his first major film project, a World War I air epic called Hell's Angels, which took three years to complete thanks to the shift from silent to sound filming and Hughes' relentless perfectionism. However, the film was a massive hit, and the eccentric inventor became a mogul in Hollywood, making Jean Harlow a star and enjoying a romance with Katharine Hepburn. But Hollywood's old-boy network never fully accepted Hughes, and in time his passion for flying began to reclaim his attentions as he began designing new planes, setting air speed records, flying around the world, and risking his life testing aircraft. Hughes also found time to romance Ava Gardner and founded his own airline, Trans-World Airlines, though as his ideas became bolder, his approach became more eccentric, and he gained many powerful enemies, including the head of Pan-American Airlines, Juan Trippe, and Senator Ralph Owen Brewster, who attempted to prove that Hughes' radical design ideas were actually part of an effort to bilk taxpayers for millions of dollars through government contracts.
The movie is all rather sprawling and a bit disjointed, but Scorsese's vigorous pacing and eye for detail hold it all together and provide a vivid setting for DiCaprio's masterful performance.Scorsese gives us a lot more than the Charles Foster Kane of the clouds. He keeps focus on Hughes, the dreamer, who continually reached out, grabbed the future and pulled it toward him.But still,the story almost predictable in the way it delivers the cinematic goods, yet there's no denying that it is a compelling and entertaining look at a larger-than-life individual.This biopic of Howard Hughes is being hailed as another excellent film.