Something's missing

Rating: 7/10 (5 April 2010)

With a record of deep and troubled portraits: Travis Bickle and Jake la Motta, Scorsese has all the ability, and more, to deliver on a strong level about Hughes. But somehow it doesn't.
On the good side there is the slick and rich production, the moving camera (adapting FW Murnau), the design, the flight sequences are extraordinary, even if a little too CGI, but still exciting. The romance with Hepburn is intriguing but it goes nowhere and doesn't say much about Hughes at all. Blanchett really takes this movie over in her performance.
On the negative side, when the Hepburn story is over the movie drops in intensity. Hughes is a weird and ill man and unlike Scorsese's other damaged properties, the illness just removes any possible connection. Sure, as Pauline Kael said, "Raging Bull" was about pond life, but it had an eloquent story about America for that group of people. Here the overt illness and script are more like a boys own adventure gone wrong but it does not connect to the wider themes that Scorsese was probably targeting, as he has in other movies. At the end the resonance is not there as it was with Travis Bickle: Hughes is not like the viewer with his OCD.
But more difficult is the casting of DiCaprio, where he is a capable actor but his face is wrong: it's too sweet, it's too young. It's not fair, because he does a good job but it still doesn't fit the movie but DiCaprio is a key reason why it falters. Billy Wilder said casting is everything and here that maxim is true. Movies rely on faces and close ups and how audiences respond to faces, and with movie stars, the baggage they bring, how the audience feels about them and the roles they take is crucial to acceptance. In this respect DiCaprio should have passed on the role.