Soaring yet falling

Rating: 10/10 (27 February 2012)

The Aviator is, yet another, Scorsese masterpiece that deals with the life and glory of a character I would've never seen myself liking so much. The story is focused on Howard Hughes, a character who, undoubtedly, is foreign to many people in the present. Hughes inherited his parents' fortune at twenty-two, directed the most expensive movie at the time, spent money worse than a drunken sailor, and was building planes that were set to be used by the Army Air Forces. Enigmatic, yes. But far from a feasible hero.
Hughes is played effortlessly by Leonardo DiCaprio. He has already established that he'll take any role, from J. Edgar to a man on a doomed ship, and he has been on a continuing streak of fantastic films. We can pretend Romeo and Juliet never existed. Here, he accepts the challenge to focus on the glory years of Hughes (1927 to around the early forties), where he was living the dream, then quickly becoming his own worst enemy. DiCaprio's challenge is also presented when he must transition Hughes delicately from a fully functioning, money-hungry womanizer to a slowly, defeatist madmen without overacting or hammering home on the clichés. The result is beyond commendable.
Hughes, himself, was a man that possessed energy, efficiency, courage, and determination in limitless amounts. He had the ability to pick up any woman he wanted, say anything he wanted, and casually ask a woman to marry him like one would say "pass the salt." Not only was he a professional ladies man, he was a surreal filmmaker, directing a film called Hell's Angles at twenty-two. After two years of unprecedented hell trying to get the film shot efficiently, right down to cloud formations, he casually tells his business executive, Noah Dietrich (Reily) that he'd like to reshoot it, this time, occupying sound to please a demanding audience. Was he completely unaware of the time and money he put into the silent version, or just a reckless spender of money? Going back to his womanizing ways, one woman Hughes put through hell and high-water was Katharine Hepburn (Blanchett). She had to put up with his increasing OCD habits, not to mention once his name became big because of Hell's Angles, all the starlets that would inevitably follow. She left him soon after, much to his dismay.
What did Hughes do maybe achieve closure or ease the pain? Become involved with more women. One of them was fifteen year old Faith Domergue (Garner) and another being the amazingly beautiful Ava Gardner (Beckinsale).
After his work behind the camera, Hughes put films in the foreground, as he wanted to focus on something bigger; aircrafts. He loved them more than life itself. He had a monstrous idea; to build a blame that could float on water and soar higher than plausible. He would name it "Hercules," a name of piercing accuracy.
The art direction is extraordinary. One of the most thrilling scenes involves something Scorsese rarely uses, but when it is applied, he always uses effectively; special effects. The scene involves Hughes crash-landing in Beverly Hills with the wing of the plane slicing the rooftops of houses like a table saw cutting through a tin can. This scene is fantastic because it doesn't focus on the awesomeness of it all, but it the peril and the exhilaration Hughes must have felt while in the plane. His struggle to get out is absolutely haunting and impossible to ignore.
Apparently, Scorsese mimicked the bipack color scheme used in films back in the day. This adds sort of a lighter, "easy on the eyes" kind of tonality that I have not experienced in films in a long time. Green objects appear to be blue, and some of the later scenes are shots using three strip Technicolor. Not only does Scorsese utilize old technology to tell a timeless story, he presents it the way it would've been told back then. Colorized stock footage mainly makes up the aerial battles, which are wonderfully coherent and intense as can possibly be.
Another thing to pay close attention to are the planes. They are scale models, rather than computer creations. This, again, adds to the "easy on the eyes" tonality. Everything is natural and looks ravishing, better than anything that could've been created from a software program. It only provides to the already extremely genuine picture we are watching.
Howard Hughes was determined, enigmatic, energetic, courageous, yet a sad figure overall. A man consumed by his fear and his uncontrollable OCD. The later scenes of his life, which I dare not spoil, are so devastating and upsetting they are sometimes hard to watch. Here's a man that had it all, then plummeted into a dark, endless hole of murkiness never to be mentioned again until his tragic death in 1976. Rather than plod along through the most likely noneventful teen years leading up to the production of Hell's Angles, The Aviator chooses to reestablish the glory days of Hughes. The film omits the darker days of Hughes life, such as the sixties and the seventies. What we're supposed to feel at the end is unclear, but one thing is for sure, if we walked out sad, it would be extremely out of place.
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Alan Alda, Alec Baldwin, Kate Beckinsale, John C. Reilly, Gwen Stefani, and Jude Law. Directed by: Martin Scorsese.