Little Howie Hughes

Rating: 5/10 (6 January 2005)

I had mixed feelings as I left the theater after seeing The Aviator. What I experienced were moments of inspired film-making interspersed with rather tepid interludes illustrating the life of a man suffering from OCD who just happened to be Howard Hughes. I never really discovered what made this man tick, and if you're going to do a biopic of an historical figure like Hughes, it seems to me that to plumb the depths of someone so well-known, to discover what isn't so well-known, is the whole point. Adding to my frustration was the casting of DiCaprio himself. I just felt he was too baby-faced(or maybe baby-voiced) to convince me that here was a man who had experienced life, on the edges and otherwise. He sounded too much like a fresh-faced actor "playing" old, complete with faux-raspiness to his voice. Hughes was a good-looking man, but there was something dark behind his eyes and deeply cynical in his voice and manners, judging from the few film clips I've seen of the man. I just didn't feel like DiCaprio nailed it. Cate Blanchett is another matterat first, I was a trifle embarrassed by her mannered performance--actually more like mimicking--as Kate Hepburn. Did Kate Hepburn really act likeKate Hepburn, in private? Despite my considerable initial misgivings, I thought she warmed to the role and began to portray her as a person and not a caricature. Finally, I have to say that the ending did seem rather arbitrary to me. It's as if Scorcese, realizing the limitations of capturing the arc of someone with so full a life of Hughes in less than long-form (miniseries) format, decided to end it with a somewhat predictable momentthe flight of the Hercules. It's become rather formulaic for biopics now--- let's end it at the crowning achievement of our subject's life because we don't have the time or perhaps inclination to follow a life to its (sometimes bitter) end. All said though, there were moments of truly exhilarating film-making, moments I rarely experience any more, where the sheer joy of cinema creates a kind of euphoria apart from the emotions or mood conveyed on screen. The test flight of the XF-11, scored to Bach, was one. Baroque music, with its emphasis on complexity and technicality, seemed an appropriate accompaniment to a complex and sophisticated machine like an airplane which also has the means to awe and move us with beauty and power, and the scene just soared. If such scenes had been accompanied by a little more back-story, The Aviator would have been a more satisfying experience.