Fun flick. Not *Citizen Kane*, or anything, but fun.

Rating: 5/10 (5 February 2005)

Perhaps if Scorsese hadn't been essentially BULLIED into making the film by Leonardo DiCaprio, the director might have TRIED to make *The Aviator* his own *Citizen Kane*. But since the idea wasn't Scorsese's own, he makes no particular effort to achieve artistic excellence, instead amiably agreeing to do some respectable hack-work. The idea here is to make a big entertaining picture. Scorsese succeeds.
Expect no more than that, however. *The Aviator* is ultimately a piece of corporate art, baiting Oscars. The canvas is unnecessarily large -- from the late 1920's to the late 1940's -- in the manner of your typical Oscar-hungry biopic. The movie sketches various aspects of Howard Hughes' professional and private life, from his monomaniacal auterist ambitions for the movie *Hell's Angels* (costing an inconceivable 4 million dollars -- the equivalent of about 700 or 800 million of today's dollars) to his uncanny futurist visions that prodded the budding aeronautical industry forward. Included are some gossipy interludes with Katherine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. And, of course, we get the inevitable obsessive-compulsive disorder that stalked him, deteriorating his mind even as his career and legend rose to unprecedented heights.
But what does it all mean? In *Citizen Kane*, Orson Welles and writer Herman Mankiewicz spend the entire movie laying bare the life and motives of Charles Foster Kane: while, at the end of the picture, the shadowy reporters from the magazine stumble around Xanadu mouthing trite observations about a man's life being a puzzle, the audience has in the meantime learned where the missing pieces are located. Expect no such insight into Hughes in *The Aviator*. Why was Hughes so interested in airplanes, anyway? Why was he interested in the movies? Was the oil business (he had inherited his initial millions from a company that produced drill bits) really so much more boring than those other fields? -- and if so, why? Why was a man inflicted with a smörgåsbord of neuroses -- among them, intense dislike of crowds -- drawn to nightclubs and the Hollywood scene? Why was a man with a morbid fear of germs alley-catting around with every starlet in town? Why does this movie elide the subject of his several messy marriages?
Who knows? I keep reading here that the mystery of Hughes is what makes him so fascinating, and is what makes *The Aviator* a masterpiece . . . but isn't that a counterintuitive notion? If we're not going to learn about what made the man tick, then what's the point? Scorsese doesn't even offer a point of view about Hughes, after all is said and done. He just throws the man up there, with his brilliance and his madness, as if to say, "YOU figure him out." This strikes me as the height of laziness, but then, as I've said, this movie isn't really Scorsese's to begin with.
It's DiCaprio's, and he acts the hell out of the role, despite not really having the physical qualifications for it. I've always enjoyed DiCaprio as an actor -- his talent was always precocious, and now it has matured. I particularly enjoyed his work in the early scenes, when his obsessive-compulsive disorder manifested itself in a barely perceptible way. DiCaprio blanks out for just a second -- he disconnects. He plays the more moderate episodes with a mixture of menace and humor (the look on his face, half fear and half disgust, when he tells a colleague to wipe off a speck of dirt from his coat lapel, is a pretty magnificent thing to watch). He's less successful when he's going crazy in the film room, looking like a naked Jesus, but that's more the fault of the script, which should never take us to such ludicrously baroque extremes. I also enjoyed Cate Blanchette as Hepburn: she doesn't look like her in the least, but she captures Hepburn's peculiar voice and her overall persona superbly. Only a great actress can play one of our greatest actresses -- Blanchette fits that bill. In the final analysis, Scorsese must be praised for making such a CINEMATIC movie, if for nothing else. The flying scenes are exciting and easy to follow (the most spectacular is a crash-landing in 1940's Beverly Hills), the period details are sumptuous (Alec Baldwin's Pan-Am office, with its proto-Space Age decor, is a stand-out), and there are some great scenes for the actors (the best of which is a Dinner From Hell at the Hepburn estate). *The Aviator* is definitely a good time at the movies . . . although I suspect it was meant to be more than that. But in this degraded and degrading era for the movies, a good time is good enough for me.
5 stars out of 10.