HH did amazing things, but why?

Rating: 6/10 (24 January 2005)

I was not very familiar with Howard Hughes. I knew he had made a few movies (never saw any of them, though) and built planes that never flew, but mainly I thought of him as the eccentric recluse of his later years. Now this film shows a totally different character, a man with a vision. And what a vision! HH could so easily have become another spoiled rich kid, bedding starlets, getting drunk and doped up and dying never having done anything besides spending millions seeking vain private pleasures. Instead, the film shows us a frantic movie maker, giving it all for his art, and an even more frantic aviator and airplane builder, to whom a few million dollars are insignificant when they are needed to make his dreams come true. Of course, it's easy to be a big spender when you are swimming in money, and I couldn't see any sign of HH having any social conscience in an era where so many of his countrymen were starving, but at least he used his fortune to create things he believed in. Grandiose things, crazy, fascinating things. But why did he do it? The film never tells us what made HH do all those things he did. First we see him as a kid being washed by his mother, which is probably supposed to explain his future phobia, but then we see him in the middle of shooting Hell's angels and next as a daredevil aviator. How did he get there? Why did he become such an obsessed movie maker (it made me think of Orson Welles, equally obsessed but without the money to follow through on his grand schemes)? And why did he want so much to build the perfect plane? The film could easily have addressed these questions. It certainly was long enough. Unnecessarily so in a number of scenes, I find (although I wouldn't have minded if some other, brilliantly shot scenes would have been longer). By cutting more rigorously, much more could have been covered in those 3 hours.
Enough has already been said about the very good acting. Still, I like to complement Leonardo DiCaprio on his transformation from the young jeune premier to the mature businessman appearing before the committee. He is much more convincing than James Dean attempting the same transformation (and also sporting a mustache when older) in Giant. Unfortunately, I was less thrilled by his naked lunatic scenes, which were mainly embarrassing to watch.