Excellent Biopic, but Mediocre Scorsese

Rating: 9/10 (8 January 2005)

Don't get me wrong, I loved this film. And I would be delighted to see Martin Scorsese win Best Director and the film win Best Picture. But for Scorsese, this is (best case) his 5th best film (behind Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Mean Streets) and I will choke a bit if the Academy chooses to honour this after ignoring his masterpieces.
This is an epic film with an intimate feel, in which the director makes no wrong choices. By concentrating on Howard Hughes' life from 1927 to 1947, his glory years before his long and pathetic decent, we get to see the legend and myth of Hughes and not the cartoon character.
As The Aviator opens, Hughes has recently inherited his parents fortune and he seems bent on spending all of it to make Hell Angels, and World War I picture concentrating on spectacular flying scenes. We get to know the Hughes who was a mad risk-taker, a womanizer of Hollywood's most elite and a genius business man. (It is interesting to watch how he succeeds by a succession of near-bankruptcies).
Intertwined with this are brief flashes of the madness to come - his battle with OCD and his sickening obsession with germs. For a drink, he orders milk, in the bottle, seal on. And when he is enjoying his dinner, he is nearly ill when someone picks a single pea off of his plate.
If this film wins an Oscar, it will be Cate Blanchett for her stunning portrayal of Katherine Hepburn. Blanchett brings to life the accent, quirky tomboy behaviour and irreverence that made Hepburn a legend off the screen.
For all the CGI and special effects in this film, its greatest scenes are person to person, most notably the senate hearings. Alan Alda is perfect as Senator Brewster, a crooked politician who is trying to bring down Hughes to advance his own career. Their lunch meeting leading up to the hearings and the time they spend across the table on National TV are the movies best moments.
Martin Scorsese is one of the great directors for brining out performances and this film is no exception. Leonardo DiCaprio avoids many opportunities to overact in this film, and creates Hughes as a complex and puzzling man slowly slipping away from reality. Supporting roles from Alec Baldwin as the president of Pan Am and John C. Reilly as Hughes' hapless business manager, keep the film from dragging.
For fans of aviation scenes, you may never find a better picture. Much of the film's budget has been spent recreating some of Hughes more ambitious inventions and failures. The crashing of his prototype spy plane into a Hollywood residential neighbourhood may be the single greatest plane crash scene ever filmed, not because of the plane crashing, but because of the different perspectives that are shown.
This by no means Martin Scorsese's best film, but it is his best since Goodfellas and it is a great movie. ***1/2 out of ****.