Hughes released from his padded room

Rating: 9/10 (27 January 2005)

For most of my adult life Howard Hughes was a cartoon figure: the endlessly lampooned, reclusive, phobic multi-millionaire. What little I knew of the back story only deepened the caricature -- the Spruce Goose, the Russell bra, the Hollywood romances. So it was a delightful surprise to find this blockbuster giving me a glimmer of a real human being, talented wunderkind, supremely creative, paranoid, loyal, mentally ill. DiCaprio as Hughes and Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn were both stunning -- sure Oscar nominees I think. The special effects were beyond what I needed, but I loved the sense of high-speed parallel lives of the pioneer aviator, the empire builder tackling movie production, aircraft design, and an international air line simultaneously, the relentless womanizer lost without a woman, the obsessive-compulsive matching egos with the mighty of Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street, as he is drawn deeper into the vortex of his illness.