Tedious and LONG.

Rating: 3/10 (18 January 2005)

I love almost everything Scorsese has ever done, save this film. It's too long by almost an hour. There's an adage that a director should never put something on the screen more than once to illustrate that which has already been clearly exposed. With the help of Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese has always succeeded in maintaining incredibly prolonged sequences of punch and great verve throughout his movies, up until now. It's not clear what went wrong. Maybe Ms. Schoonmaker wasn't given an adequately free hand in this one. I'm not a DiCaprio hater, but there's such a doting absorption with the way the camera lingers on his pretty face here that it's hard to come out of this movie without being sick to death of him. What's worse, Leo's terribly miscast in the role. When trying to play the older, disheveled Hughes, he appears not so much a sloppy eccentric as simply a man-child in an over-sized suit. There are exactly three instances of levity in this film, and all of them fall completely flat. Compare this with every other Scorsese film, from Mean Streets to Gangs of New York, all of which were alleviated by brilliant, memorable moments of gallows humor, and you'll understand immediately what would happen if the director were to completely lose his ability to play with his subjects. And while it's true that Hughes had an interesting life, it all seems like a very long life when you're forced to watch his unhappy compulsions replayed compulsively, what seems eternally, and worst of all, not very originally, for hour after hour after hour (after hour after hour after hour, as he might say.) The flight sequences don't do anything for us, because we've seen it all before. All the pretty tinting to make the film look like it was shot in hand-tinted black and white can't rescue this goose. Actually, the fact that it just won a Golden Globe says more about what's happened to the Globes than it does about this film. I wish I'd gotten my money back when I left the theater. I wish I'd downloaded it; watching the progress bar would have been more exciting than the movie itself.