Extremely well-done (though probably with a lot of artistic license)

Rating: 9/10 (5 October 2005)

I've never been attached to a Scorcese film, and I barely know Leonardo DiCaprio from Adam, so I had no real prejudices about this one. (I have always had a great interest in Howard Hughes, but that could just as easily make me prejudiced AGAINST this one as FOR it.) But I think it really worked, almost completely. One half-way small thing is the music. I've always had a real hang-up about "period" movies (and others) that have songs squeezed edgewise into them.For instance, there's Scorcese's own "Goodfellas". I like strange things worked into movies (to put it mildly), but even I couldn't enjoy the idea of a MAFIA movie that uses "Atlantis" as the music for a mob killing scene, or "Layla" as its closing music! But when I see the credits of a movie, and see a dozen songs that I don't remember hearing, that's a good thing, because it means they were worked into it in a half-way subtle way. And that's what happened in The Aviator - apart from the nightclub songs, and a few others, the ' 20s - ' 40s music was worked in pretty casually. I think about the only thing that went against DiCaprio physically was height (Howard Hughes was almost 6 ft. 4), but that's a small enough problem. As for that look that someone described as an "I've got to get to a men's room" look, I think it was just a properly "intense" one. And again, I have no axe to grind about him as an actor. And Kate Beckinsall (sp.), someone else I don't really know at all, was really great, in such an "understated" way, as Ava Garner, especially in that one big scene, where she more or less brings him out of his isolation (I couldn't really care less whether that episode is true or not). And Alec Baldwin as Trippe, and Alan Alda (someone I AM pretty prejudiced about) as Brewster. In that one line, where he asks if he's "ON the committee, or CHAIRMAN of the committee?", he sounds like a little kid hinting at a favor, instead of a slick politician, in other words, perfectly "disingenuous." And Cate Blanchette was great as Katherine Hepburn (though in some ways maybe less so than the actress Tovah Feldshuh in the TV movie with Tommy Lee Jones, though I don't think many people here would agree with that). Someone mentioned the overdone "CGI" effects, and I'm usually the first to be put off by that, but I think they WEREN'T overdone in this film, and were genuinely great in the filming-of-Hell's Angels scenes. Though I agree with one person here about that plane crash scene - I don't think it was unintentionally comical, but it was still overdone. Someone mentioned the movie unfairly blaming his mother for his phobias, and that might be true, but I know that Clifford Irving, in his infamous fake autobiography, mentions Mr. Hughes getting some of his ideas about hygiene from his mother, and I know that that fake autobiography used a lot of REAL facts (though I don't know whether that was one of them). I think The Aviator really worked, including the really unsettling last scene.