a pleasant surprise

Rating: 9/10 (6 January 2005)

With apparent effortlessness this film about Howard Hughes does the cleverest little trick. It becomes Howard Hughes - powerful, stylish, and bold beyond all fear of criticism. Complaints of the film's length abound. I find that astonishing. I can't believe Mr. Scorcese didn't need more of my time for what he did - I surely would have granted it. It takes a mere 166 minutes to paint a vast and somehow intimate portrait of one of the most enigmatic figures of the twentieth century. Not a simple task. To begin with, biopics are dangerous territory for any director. The charge: distill a man's life into a few cans of film. Oftentimes Biopics tend to be hollow and external linear narratives - the subject's life from birth to death. Often when this boring mistake is avoided today's directors tend to go in another equally erroneous direction. They'll hijack a man's life, boiling it down to an over-simplistic story arc to frame the film in a contrived but filmicly effective context. I point to Taylor Hackford's RAY in which Ray Charles' life is distilled to a battle with heroin brought on by guilt stemming from the death of his brother. I'm sure Ray was more than that. Or as in MONSTER the life is boiled down to what else but a love story. It is easy to recreate the events of a man's life on film, but is much harder and more interesting to recreate the man himself. Scorcese knows this and he goes after that most difficult target - the essence of the man, the core drive and spirit that made him noteworthy. In conveying this essence Scorcese does something that far too few filmmaker's will do this day. He trusts the audience, laying in almost no exposition, showing rather than telling. He lets his audience fill in the blanks, rather than boring us with information we already know too well, and for that i am grateful. Some hoped the film would dwell more heavily on the death and demise of Howard Hughes, the dirt, the rumors and the insanity. But these are the things for which the daring and irrepressible figure is now most often known, but none of us knew the man. Mr. Scorcese has done a thorough job with our introduction. Please to meet you, Mr. Hughes.