Disappointingly hollow

Rating: Null/10 (27 April 2008)

Though a film director, Howard Hughes is more accurately remembered as a half-baked engineer, an irresponsible pilot, an underhanded billionaire capitalist, and most spectacularly, a world-class neurotic whose famous descent into unwashed, paranoid junkie madness in the years before his death, assured his notoriety after many other late industrialists had faded from the country's consciousness.
You'd think such an eccentric personality would lend itself to an interesting film, but Scorsese seems unable to get inside the mind or life of Howard Hughes. His Hughes is a caricature. A fast talking businessman plagued by occasional bouts of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
"The Aviator" plays like a bloated retread of France Ford Coppola's "Tucker: A Man and his dreams". The cocky entrepreneur, the boardroom battles, the obligatory romance, the scenes where our hero's "out of the box" thinking solves some design flaw. Both films are identical, hollow and overstuffed pieces of work.
Like Jeff Bridges in "Tucker", Leonardo Dicaprio plays a cartoonish maverick, desperately fighting for our attention. Attempts by Scorsese to flesh out his psychology are crude. For example, an incestuous scene featuring a naked Hughes and his mother, and a couple shots of Dicaprio obsessing over silly details (handshakes, doorknobs etc).
No attempt is made to link Hughes the success to Hughes and his demons. The ironic fact that his OCD is what made Hughes' business life so successful, is seemingly lost on Scorsese. The film does, however, have a nice running joke about Hughes' obsession with breasts and breast milk. The man has some warped fixation on women and their mammaries, but the film's PG rating prevents this from going anywhere interesting.
Visually, both Coppola and Scorsese's films are overproduced and overly pretty. There's no sense of real time or space. Instead it's all big sets, bawdy colours and larger than life personalities. Scorsese has bought the false view of Hollywood and then spat it back out at us.
Hughes' romance with Katerine Hepburn takes up most of the film's running time. It's a lifeless and dull romance, devoid of wit, understanding or heat. From here on the film loses its energy. Hughes goes from a watchable eccentric to boring caricature.
One of Scorsese's signatures is that he can get inside a character's head by moving the camera or cutting into a scene. When Henry Hill is coked out in "Goodfellas" the jumpy camera-work and breakneck editing are similarly jazzed, and when Jake La Motta takes a blow in "Raging Bull" it feels as if you're getting smacked around in the ring with him.
If the first hour of "The Aviator" flows, it's because Hughes is at the top of his game and Scorsese is riding the character's highs with a visual style that is equally fluid and effortless. But when Hughes starts falling apart, Scorsese loses his momentum. The film drifts into seemingly endless takeoffs and landings and a drawn-out drama involving Hughes's competitors (completely lifted from Coppola's film) which features Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda as a matched set of vipers.
At the end of the film, Hughes locks himself in a screening room, strips off his clothes and begins a babblogue that echoes a similar meltdown in "Raging Bull." DiCaprio tries hard to pull off a pantomime of madness, but neither he nor Scorsese taps into the pity and terror underlying the episode.
Hughes died a skeletal drug addict, broken-off hypodermic needles embedded in his arms. He was a sad freak, a depressed maverick, an outcast and eventually a figure of public fun, which perhaps explains why Scorsese tends to play the character's tics for light laughs, even when they don't seem very funny.
A darker, more complex work, would have made the Hughes character more interesting. As it is, "The Aviator" is a huge failure, a pg13 grasp for mainstream attention, offering no truth or insight into Howard Hughes the man.
4/10 - Bloated emptiness. Aside from some energetic and fun scenes during the first half hour (all of which stress DiCaprio's cockiness) the film fails to go anywhere interesting.