There could have been a lesson to this movie

Rating: 3/10 (30 December 2004)

There could have been a lesson to this movie. Instead, the whole painful three hours skirted around it, whitewashing a truth that was far more interesting than this odd portrait of Howard Hughes.
In his prime, Howard Hughes was 6'4" tall and strong: a strapping man. When he died, he weighed 93 pounds. One of the striking images of my youth, was that of this shriveled, white-bearded little human being carried to the car by his bodyguard. Howard Hughes had become a tiny, grotesque, skeletal puppet.
Watching "The Aviator" was not unlike the tour of Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley. In both places, we are treated to a view of the eccentric and wonderful genius, but something is left out.
And that thing, is the drugs.
Yes, Hughes was obsessive-compulsive, germ-phobic to a point of the bizarre, but his paranoias were increased, honed, finally made all-encompassing by something far more understandable  his drug addiction.
Howard Hughes did indeed have the enormous plane wreck that's depicted mid-way through "The Aviator." The amount of morphine, codeine, and goodness knows what else that would have been necessary to treat that much burn tissue, broken ribs, and collapsed lung, would make an addict out of anyone. Add a compulsive and addictive personality, and all the money in the world, and it's not hard to understand what happened to Hughes.
What is hard to understand, is why that wasn't in Scorsese's movie.
In one interesting scene, we see Ava Gardner reappear in Hughes' life to get him ready to appear before a congressional hearing. Hughes had locked himself in his movie studio, and then in a wing of his mansion, refusing to touch anything, delusional, insane. In scriptwriter John Logan's version, Gardner shaves him, cleans him up, gives him a pep talk, and this cures his insanity and he's ready to go head to head with the United States Senate.
This makes no sense, of course. And how much more sense, how much more interesting and valuable an episode could this have been, if we saw what seems far more likely: that what Gardner did, was truly to "clean him up." She got him sober. She put him back together, straightening him out just long enough that he could face something other than his drug-strengthened demons.
There are great bits in this movie, strong parts that contribute to the tragedy of this movie's inevitable vacuousness. Cate Blanchett's impersonation of Katherine Hepburn is so spot-on that it's funny, and finally even touching. When a film is released in December, you know that they're shooting for Oscars, and this one is surely aimed at getting a nomination for DiCaprio, but he's miscast. Hughes by all accounts was large, terse, intense, and DiCaprio is too energetic and boyish for this mature role. The camera and visual direction are lovely, if too long. The aviation scenes are fabulous.
OK, so perhaps a defense of "The Aviator" would go like this: this movie wasn't supposed to be about drugs. It was about Hughes in a few years of his life when he was directing movies and changing the world of aviation, which he surely and undoubtedly did. It's about the congressional investigation and his start into the world of madness. Presenting the drugs would have made it, finally, a picture about an addict, instead of about an aviator.
If so, then the my-mom-told-me-germs-are-bad didn't need the massive play it got. The mental illness it too central to the entire picture. Personality disorder is the driving force of "The Aviator," and it's wrong.
That defense doesn't work, furthermore, when the movie claims to be a biography, and anyway the essence needn't be "Howard Hughes in Trainspotting." If "The Aviator's" Hughes had, locked in his studio, taken some pills just once; if Ava Gardner had shown up in his mansion and thrown away the prescription bottles; these small gestures would have made the point about the truth without becoming a preachy anti-drug lecture. Instead, it made up a fiction.
By the end of this film, I practically wanted to stand up and shout at the entire audience, "He was a drug addict! When he died, he weighed 90 pounds! What is this nonsense?" Instead, I just left, and returned home to look up one glowing review after another on the internet. One of Time Magazine's reviewers has put it on the top of his "Best" list for 2004. Time Magazine was the one that had that famous picture of the shriveled and near-death Hughes on its cover, in 1976. (http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,1101761213,00.html)
Removing the drugs from the lives of Howard Hughes, and Elvis Presley, is not a virtuous whitewash that allows us to retain our heroes. Rather, it loses the value of the tragedy. When I was a high school teacher, I could look kids in the eye who were starting to experiment and say to them: "Look at the people lying on the street in their stupors, and ask yourself: 'How many of these people thought they were going to become addicts?' The answer is none. 'How many of them thought, as you do, "That won't happen to me. I'm different. I can take it or leave it as I wish"?' The answer is all of them. They're just like you."
Addiction could happen to hard-working, generous, perspicacious, brilliant men such as Howard Hughes, and Elvis Presley. And look what it did to them. This story would have been a far, far more interesting, compelling, and honest film, than this look-at-the-nutcase bit of Hollywood tinsel.
Instead, this movie does something that Hughes, himself, might very well have appreciated, something that he did while in Hollywood. It told a story full of pretty faces and dishonesty: one that didn't make very much sense.
Perhaps there was a lesson to this movie, after all.