Like the Platte River ...Too long...Too Shallow

Rating: 4/10 (3 January 2005)

﻿ The Aviator is about aviation innovator Howard Hughes. It is about womanizer Howard Hughes. It is about psychopath Howard Hughes. Any one of these would have made an interesting film. Altogether they resulted in a shallow portrayal over too long a period of time to retain my interest. In short, I was bored.
Let's look at the love affairs. The bit about Jean Harlow was so minuscule it could easily have been cut with no harm to the biography. The same could be said about the scenes with Faith Domergue. The Ava Gardner story could have been interesting, but it was too fragmented to be of interest. Only the Kate Hepburn story was truly compelling, mostly because of the exceptional performance of Cate Blanchett. Still, even this episode  which could have been developed into a two-hour story  left me wanting.
Then, there's the psycho-pathological element. Who was his mother and why did she treat him like she did? We don't know. Was this a sexually abusive relationship? The opening bath scene leaned in that direction, but we don't know. If Hughes was so horrendously phobic, why did the phobia take so long to emerge and wreck his life? We don't know. It's a shame the writer and director did not reveal the answers to these questions. Perhaps no one knows the answers; we just know he was psychopathic.
Finally, let's talk about aviation. I love airplanes. I could relate to Hughes' passion. I could thrill with his gallivanting around the skies  racing, filming, testing, wooing Hepburn. I didn't even mind the fact that nothing in the air was real  just computer generated images. I wanted to stand by his side when he faced off with greedy Juan Trippe and sleazy Senator Owen Brewster. I wanted to fight with him and fight for him. But even this was shallowly presented. The evidence is readily apparent: major characters, identified by labels as if this were a documentary, enter the story without the viewer being prepared for who they are, why they are there, and why we should care about them. I just couldn't get hooked. I didn't care.
Interesting note: when I was first out of college, I worked as a technical writer with a man who was nearly at the end of his career. He had been with Hughes Aircraft and had the dubious honor, along with three or four others, of pulling Hughes from one of his many plane crashes. My fellow employee told tales of Hughes and of the rescue for which Howard ensured him of employment for as long as he wanted to stay on.
Sadly, The Aviator added nothing to my knowledge of Howard Hughes and, although it had great potential to tell a fabulous story about one of aviation's most celebrated innovators, it failed.