Surly Bonds.

Rating: 7/10 (18 January 2011)

Lots of computer-generated images in this story of Howard Hughes' career as aviator, businessman, movie make, and heterosexual. I'm pretty sick of CGIs. In this instance, though, I applaud Martin Scorsese's prudent use of them. This isn't a simple and dumb story on which CGIs are hung. That is, the story isn't an excuse for airplanes to dive nose first into the camera or for ten-story-tall gorillas to go ice skating in Central Park. They're used when necessary to advance the exploration of Hughes' character and don't draw attention to themselves. Their impact is more dramatic. That crash of Hughes' experimental reconnaissance airplane with the twin booms is enough to swear anyone off flying for a while.
Hughes himself -- it would be understating the fact to call him eccentric. I did part of a dissertation on Howard Hughes, based on the popular literature available at the time, and the guy we see on screen here is a lot worse off than I was led to believe. What seemed years ago as just the self indulgence of a very rich man now begins to look like the most flagrant form of obsessive-compulsive disorder with paranoid features. He wound up ensconced in a Mexican hotel suite surrounded and guarded and tended by Mormon myrmidons wearing surgical gloves. Everything became static. He watched the same movie ("Ice Station Zebra") over and over and over, to the point at which his servants, hearing the bombastic score begin behind the opening credits, sank their faces in their hands. He died of kidney shut-down in mid air without a peep.
As a younger man he was far more thumotic. He moved around, spoke to strangers, manipulated women, designed airplanes, spent money recklessly, leaving the business end of things to Noah Dietrich. When Dietrich brought up some financial details, Hughes once waved him away, saying, "You go down there and do what you want to do." We get to see quite a lot of the younger, more spirited Hughes. Well, maybe not "spiritied" but less stifled. It makes for a more lively movie. It's not merely a caricature of a guy who descended into a disabling mental illness. What would have happened to him if he'd been born poor, instead of heir to a cash cow? He'd have ended up in one of those psychiatric warehouses of the time.
The supporting cast sports some pretty good performances. Cate Blanchett is a marvelous actress and she has Katherine Hepburn's mannerisms down pat, though she looks nothing like the original. The dinner scene with Hepburn's family at their estate in Connecticut tells us about all we need to know about why they are never going to make it. Hughes was a self-educated, obsessive-compulsive Texan, with little curiosity about the world outside of his own keenly focused interests. The Hepburn family reflected a sort of "liberal arts" view of life, which is presented as elitist here. And it WAS elitist. But our sympathy for Hughes in this scene doesn't make him any more of a model of populism.
There were some problems with Leonard DiCaprio as Hughes. The main difficulty that I had is one that shouldn't matter but did. DiCaprio adopts a Southern accent but that's about the only resemblance to Hughes. Hughes was extremely tall, a real leptosome, spoke in a slow, smooth, sometimes passionate, Southern drawl. DiCaprio's voice is cracked and quick. And he's short. Tommy Lee Jones gave a more convincing performance in a TV miniseries, even if it was less attention-grabbing.
Nice job of illustrating the relationship between Hughes, on the one hand, and Alec Baldwin's Juan Trippe, who ran both Pan American Airways and an important senator from Maine. Trippe comes off as a master manipulator who systematically eliminated Pan Am's competition. Judging from casual outside reading I've done, this seems to be a widely shared view of Pan Am during the post-war years. The goal of a powerful corporation isn't to encourage competition but to establish a legitimate monopoly and establish a wide moat.
In the end, you can't help feeling sympathy for Hughes, the poor little rich boy who ends the story a little like Citizen Kane, monarch of all he surveys, and with no friends.