Has Martin Scorsese lost it?

Rating: 6/10 (25 December 2004)

The master of the small movie apparently wants to be the master of the epic film. Unfortunately this is a tall order for anyone, especially for someone who hasn't made a particularly good film (small or epic) since 1990. But at least this time he is trying for a masterpiece and not just pissing away his time with garbage. There will be inevitable comparisons with "Citizen Kane" (in fact at one point in the film a reference is even made to W.R. Hearst) but anyone who does so should get a reality check. A more appropriate side-by-side comparison would be Tim Burton's "Ed Wood", and this is a comparison that "Aviator" loses.
Which is not to say that "Aviator" is a bad movie, although certainly it is bad history and is in need of major trimming, it is at least entertaining to watch. One wonders, however, if it will fare well enough at the box office to justify its epic expense. It has a relatively small initial target audience and nothing about the final cut makes one think it will generate word-of-mouth appeal from the wider population.
There are a number of flying scenes and two are very good, the night landing on a golf course and the take-off of the Spruce Goose. There are also two that are very weak. The worst is the setting of a new speed record which has a serious continuity error, the plane on the runway was clearly not the plane in the error (bad pun intended). This was so obvious (one had a partial canopy and one had a full canopy) and they cut back and forth so much that I wondered if I was hallucinating the disparity-hard to believe that it was not handled better. The other was the crash of the spy plane in a Hollywood neighborhood. The cartoonish shots of various homeowners watching their houses being destroyed from the inside would fit a Cohn Brothers comedy but are totally out of place in this film.
The film has one great performance, Cate Blanchette channels the vocal patterns and mannerisms of Katherine Hepburn, her scenes are the highlights of the film and fortunately she has a lot of scenes. It took a lot of courage for Scorsese to not just structure the film around someone as familiar as Hepburn but to have her character played in a manner where she was recognizable to her fans.
Alan Alda does great as a slimy senator, Adam Baldwin is slick as thestrangely likable Pan Am President, Kelli Garner and the other Kate (Beckinsale) are dazzling decoration, and Ian Holm provides comic relief. Apparently Scorsese felt he needed this high caliber ensemble to compensate for miscasting the lead.
And miscast he is; from DiCaprio's first line you know that this will be a painful experience; although perhaps not quite as horrible as you would expect from his prior work. Since Scorsese's break with De Niro after Cape Fear, both director and actor have suffered. You have to believe that the replacement DiCaprio takes direction well and that Scorsese is gambling that he can hit a home run with a weak actor and not have to share the credit for his triumph. But his strategy does not work as their screen version of Hughes utterly fails to capture any of the personal magnetism of their subject. I left the theatre thinking how well Titanic Leo executed the role, for his attempt was clearly earnest; but that almost any real actor could have brought nuances to the part well beyond the scope of DiCaprio's abilities-even under Scorsese's direction. The weakness of his portrayal is not as obvious when he is the only one in a scene but it takes on varying degrees of glaring when he is paired with one of the better members of the supporting cast.
I kept coming back to Johnny Depp's portrayal of Ed Wood and wishing it was he who was playing Hughes. In real life Wood was a strange guy but almost one-dimensional when compared to Hughes. But if your only exposure to them was these movie biographies you would think that Wood was far more intriguing.