I didn't run into "great", "convincing", or "Scorsese" in here !

Rating: 5/10 (13 October 2010)

Maybe the worst thing about any movie is asking after its end; what did it want to say? Here, after this bio-pic, it was; who Howard Hughes was?!! OK, according to what we've seen, he's a millionaire with a compulsive disorder, who loves big movies, big planes, and big breasts!
As a follower of Martin Scorsese, and a fan of some movies by him, I asked myself why he handled such a project? The best I could reach, from the very movie, was how that capitalist tycoon wasn't another pedant brat (great scene with him setting among Katharine Hepburn's family as his complete opposite). He was a man with many dreams, obsessed with them, workaholic to fulfill them, and - most importantly - a fighter for them against the American administration which, in here, represents the oppressiveness (government) and conservatism (censorship). Simply, this dreamer's ambition is greater than these employees' ambition; he wants the sky, while they want offices with walls have painting stars on them.
However, I didn't buy it. Hughes was another capitalistic symbol. Making a movie about him, as a man with a dream, anti-narrow mindedness,.. etc. is a try to read him from very keen angles, making a victorious hero of him, which did give me the feel of "forced".
Then, it's in the exterior angles as well. While giving it many long scenes, the movie, so provocatively, didn't enlighten us about the man's sickness at all. It was so vague and unrelated to the subject; unless the movie is showing it as just the artist's demons that every time he fights them he wins the best of himself, becoming the hero!
There are many whys too; why Hughes loved Hepburn in specific?, why he had that sickness in specific?, why the movie dealt with the man's cinematic career as just the story's relief?, why we knew nothing about his past but that his mom was washing him as a kid, wishing him well?!!
The CGI didn't work in some shots. To tell you the truth, I was confused why to use them in the first place. For instance, the garden where Hughes lands his plane on it, after the flight with Katharine Hepburn, was CGI. So was that for cutting down the budget or something?!
Scorsese was working out of passion, unlike the usual him. It was more than obvious that he got the things done effortlessly. I have never seen him uninterested on-screen like that before. Most probably it was a deal, a Studio deal, of a movie about the eccentric once-celebrity man; where he gives them what they want, as they want, to give him later the permission to make what he wants as he wants. The smell of this "deal" is so overwhelming. Otherwise, this is the most tasteless Scorsese, or let's say the most un-Scorsese, movie!
Further, a major killer punch; Leonardo DiCaprio. I couldn't stand him utterly. I watched this movie 3 times, and for 3 times he failed to drew my attention, so how about any persuasion?! He seems too boyish and no man. His voice is a child voice. At some points, he looks like a teenager with terrible make-up as a grown up. His face doesn't look like the original Hughes, however that's not the problem. The real problem is that Leo's charisma and talent are so weak to be Hughes or else. Teases me pretty much whenever I watch him working continuously in movies for the best directors of his time, to be one of the worst factors in them, while much better actors, who surely could do higher, aren't in his shoes, having his top chances. In a word, disappointment is the basic thing I receive from him all the times yet. And it gets just bigger every time.
What did I love from it? Let me see. The moment of seeing, and hearing, the faucet's water as a torrent of knifes. It's not about expressing the lead's hallucination accurately inasmuch as the expressive power of cinema itself; to speak the unspeakable, and transmit what used to be considered as exclusively doable in other mediums literature is on their top.
The second, and the last, thing I loved was naturally the aforementioned scene of the lunch with the idiots "who don't need to work since they have too much money!". It was excellently written, perfectly delivered, and effectively impacted, despite my feeling towards how that was part of a truth which Scorsese wants to see, or wants us to see, nothing but it. It wasn't the best scene of this movie; it was the best of it at all.
(The Aviator) didn't dazzle me as a biography movie, based on Howard Hughes's life movie, or a Scorsese movie. I'm still asking after it: who that guy was? Not a success by any mean.