Portrait of a Mad Genius

Rating: 9/10 (27 December 2004)

THE AVIATOR (2004) ***1/2 Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, John C. Reilly, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda, Ian Holm, Danny Huston, Gwen Stefani, Jude Law, Adam Scott, Matt Ross, Kelli Garner, Frances Conroy, Brent Spiner, Willem Dafoe, Edward Herrmann.
Portrait of a Mad Genius
Martin Scorsese is perhaps the only filmmaker who could've done justice in tackling the Herculean effort of presenting a biography of the notorious Howard Hughes a bonafide by product of the American Dream and his quest for excellence as well as greed paying the ultimate price in the end: never fulfilling the emptiness in his life.
The millionaire is depicted in his brash youth as the inheritor to his father's fortune and up through the stormy aftermath of a congressional investigation in the mid-40s to his supposed 'war profiteering' through his various excursions into literal flights of fancy. Leonardo Di Caprio, Hollywood's Golden Boy, is the perfect choice here and does an excellent job in showing how a focused young man became a laser-eyed optimist even if it meant the brink of bankruptcy.
Among his sexual conquests were a bevy of Hollywood starlets including Katharine Hepburn (smartly played by Blanchett eschewing the possibilities of rank caricature) who he courted for some time and previously with the starlet Jean Harlow (a vague Stefani making her screen debut) and subsequently with Ava Gardner (Beckinsale providing enough grit and heart equally) who was not for sale as she makes abundantly clear.
His attempts at film-making were as brash as his business dealings with his first film "Hell's Angels" which took up to nearly three years at approx. a million per and his run in with PanAm honcho Juan Trippe (a subdued yet oily Baldwin) as he attempted to start his fledgling company TWA for international jet setting and commercial aviation as well as the aforementioned witch hunt led by Senator Brewester (a truly conniving weasely Alda).
Clearly Hughes was a visionary and a master of his own foresight as well as a cantankerous perfectionist with his share of setbacks including an incredibly scarily realized maiden test flight with a plane that crashed in Beverly Hills nearly killing him. On top of that came his slow deterioration into mental illness, which the film touches base with in getting an inkling of the tragedy to come. Scorsese deftly depicts this in short bursts with DiCaprio repeating himself ad nauseum while conversing and so germ phobic at one point he has to wait in a men's room until the door is opened from the other side.
The film excels in its sleek, retro production design by Dante Ferretti, gorgeous cinematography by Robert Richardson and snappy score by Howard Shore keeps the pacing of Scorsese's editing collaborator vet Thelma Schoonmaker at a decent pace in its nearly three hour run; my only gripe is it would've been best if they finished what they started in by showing the last chapter of his extraordinary man.
Scorsese is a truly gifted artist and expresses obsession like no one since Hitchcock and to show how one man's mania for flying high  literally and metaphorically  may in fact land him his first Oscar. It's long overdue.