High flying bird

Rating: 9/10 (13 May 2008)

Modern epic cinema of the highest order and proof that there's life in the old dog yet as Scorcese fashions a spectacular drama around the "living years" of celebrated billionaire, inventor, recluse and all-round megalomaniac, Howard Hughes. In fact perhaps the only nondescript thing about the whole enterprise is the rather dull title, otherwise there's much to feast on here. Scorcese has shown himself at home with the milieu of America in the 30's and 40's (I'm thinking particularly of his in my opinion unjustly overlooked masterpiece, "New York New York"), but here the drama is embellished by edge-of-your-seat special effects, especially the aerial ballet of the filming of "Hell's Angels" to the judderingly realistic plane crash when Hughes personally takes up one of his prototype aircraft. At the heart of the whole is Leonardo De Caprio delivering a superb turn as the by turns electric then desolate Hughes driven on but eventually driven down by his inner demons. This is a performance of great maturity, as the Hughes character moves from the years 1926 - 1946 during which time he assumes the roles of gung-ho film director, billionaire playboy, maverick inventor, spendthrift magnate to his eventual succumbing to the madness of his obsessive behaviour disorder, manifested most of all in his obsession for cleanliness. The remainder of the ensemble is mostly fine, with Kate Beckinsale alluring and headstrong as Ava Gardener, Alex Baldwin formidable as Hughes' nemesis at Pan-Am, Juan Tryppe and Alan Alda (long time no see) just right as Tryppe's man-at-Congress, Senator Brewster who attempts to bring down Hughes at a post-war Senate hearing but gets bitten himself as Hughes turns the tables on him. Less satisfactory is Cate Blanchett in another of her true-life impersonations, not quite looking or sounding enough like Kate Hepburn to convince, difficult task as that is. Perhaps the film lionises Hughes a little too much as at times he was clearly an unsavoury, selfish and cruel person, which his illnesses can never fully excuse - consider the point, for example, too lightly made, that three stunt men died during the making of "Hell's Angels", his WW1 flying epic or that his two "triumphs", which bookend the film, the eventual release of "Hell's Angels" after years in production and Hughes' successful piloting of the massive "Spruce Goose" / "Hercules" sea-plane on her test-flight, were Pyrrhic victories at best ("Hell's Angels", for all its box-office success, failed to recoup its huge production costs and the Hercules never made it into commercial production) and symptomatic of Hughes' delusions of grandeur. A man with his money and flair could have left far more lasting legacies than these and I don't think Scorcese makes that point (or even wished to), which is no doubt why we don't get to witness Hughes complete submission to his illness in his old age. Nevertheless this is a bravura piece of Hollywood mythologising with the veteran director expertly marshaling his massive resources in creating a wonderful movie that sweeps you into a whole other world and the not-quite "beautiful mind" of a gifted but tragically flawed individual.