Hughes at His Peak But Epic Biopic Not Quite a Masterpiece

Rating: 8/10 (2 June 2006)

This is an audacious, surprisingly amusing piece of Hollywood film-making by a veteran craftsman of the first magnitude, yet for a number of reasons, not necessarily of Martin Scorsese's sole doing, the movie does not resonate as much as you wish it would. In staying true to the spirit of multimillionaire magnate Howard Hughes between the late 1920's and the late 40's, Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan are stuck with the facts as they happened, and consequently, the film feels episodic with a great, sometimes dazzling story in the first 2/3 of its epic 166-minute running time and a pedantic, only occasionally involving last hour.
You need to have some familiarity with Hughes' life to understand his halcyon years proving himself as a Hollywood tycoon worthy of respect, and his legendary excess during the three-year production of the now-forgotten "Hell's Angels" is captured perfectly here with truly thrilling aviation sequences. Scorsese then focuses on Hughes' romance with Katharine Hepburn and captures the oddball chemistry of burgeoning eccentrics amid the frenzied environment of studio-owned Hollywood, in particular, the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. These sequences remind me a lot of Scorsese's failed musical, "New York, New York", but this time he seems far more assured. Ava Gardner enters the picture in the forties, as Hughes builds luxury airplanes that can't fly and his obsessions and paranoia start to take over. There's a magnificently filmed sequence of Hughes crashing his XF-11 plane in the middle of Beverly Hills.
Once he recovers from this incident, the film starts to drag, as the story shifts focus to the power struggles in positioning Hughes' airline TWA against the European-route monopoly of Pan Am and the machinations of Pan Am CEO Juan Trippe and the corrupt Maine senator Owen Brewster who investigates Hughes' WWII government contracts. Even the legendary mini-flight of the Spruce Goose fails to excite this late in the story. Only Scorsese's famous "Taxi Driver"-like, mind-bending touch brings off the surrealism of the sequences where Hughes locks himself up in his room. The film ends rather anticlimactically with Hughes' successful 1947 appearance before Brewster's committee before he drowns in his obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
Leonardo DiCaprio's chief asset as an actor is his intensity of purpose, and as Hughes, he has plenty of opportunities to display this attribute with his character's obsessions with aviation, movie-making, glamorous movie stars and ultimately germs. What he is missing is a level of gravitas that would have made his character's increasing eccentricities more bearable to watch. Even though the reed-thin Texas-tinged voice is accurate, there is something perpetually juvenile about DiCaprio's appearance regardless of the twenty-year span of the story. This unfortunately compromises the chemistry between him and the obviously more mature Cate Blanchett, who initially seems to be crossing the border into parody as Hepburn. She displays the familiar brusque manner without caution and even affects the recognizable voice but with an inaccurate throatiness that belies the legendary actress' high, fluttery pitch at the time. Nevertheless, she eventually finds her grounding, especially as she recognizes their too-similar personalities and softens during the Hepburn family gathering scene.
With less to do, the too-patrician Kate Beckinsale is in over her head as Ava Gardner, unable to convey the real actress' palpable sultriness or predatory voraciousness without posturing. On the other hand, Alec Baldwin is becoming a stronger character actor with every new film, and he plays Trippe with disquieting authority. John C. Reilly plays assistant Noah Dietrich in his typically hangdog fashion as he subsists more in the shadows. Alan Alda plays Brewster with Hawkeye's familiar mannerisms unafraid to show the underlying sliminess of his character. All the externals are impressive - Thelma Schoonmaker's sharp editing (the pacing never drags...just the story), Robert Richardson's cinematography, Dante Ferretti's production design, Sandy Powell's costumes. Yet for all of this, the movie falls short as a masterwork in Scorsese's filmography. This is a film to respect and not to love.
The first disc has an excellent commentary track by Scorsese, Schoonover and producer Michael Mann - all full of insights without being pedantic. The number of extras on the second disc of the two-DVD set is staggering, really too much for anyone except for those deeply interested in Hughes. There is one deleted scene and twelve separate featurettes and documentaries covering everything from the production to Hughes' role in aviation to OCD to the music. Beyond the sheer number, my complaint about the set is that it's hard to maneuver around the decidedly viewer-unfriendly menus.