Overstuffed Biopic Has Moments

Rating: 5/10 (13 July 2016)

Can the outsized ambition of one of Hollywood's biggest legends smash Hollywood convention and make a picture for the ages? How about two legends, then? Star Leonardo DiCaprio and director Martin Scorsese give it a ride, anyway.
Howard Hughes inherited a lot of money and a fear of germs. Enjoying the first before the second tears him apart, he sets about making a movie that runs up seven-figure bills in 1927, then scraps it and remakes it for sound. "Hell's Angels" turns out quite a hit, but Hughes has already moved on to other passions, building experimental planes and bedding Hollywood starlets. Sure it sounds like fun, but can he survive the crash landings?
One of his lovers, Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), puts it this way: "There's too much Howard Hughes in Howard Hughes. That's the trouble."
That's the trouble with "The Aviator," too. Taking a 20-year wedge of Hughes' life that incorporated everything from round-the-world flights to building a transcontinental airline, the movie struggles for a focus. In a five-minute span, we see Hughes design a monoplane, take Jean Harlow to a film premiere, and found a future mega-business, Hughes Aircraft. Scorsese is in a hurry to dazzle you with overlit sequences and fuzzy CGI.
DiCaprio's ascension to the ranks of Hollywood's elite seems to have been the true focus of this film. He's fine, too, shedding his youthful image with an eerie approximation of Hughes' Texas drawl that is equal parts authority and anxiety. I just felt there were times when too much of the director's attention was on having Leo do an acting clinic and show the Oscar people something. He's best here working off other people, namely Alan Alda as a nasty senator named Brewster set on bringing Hughes down.
Alda was nominated for an Oscar; Blanchett won one, either her first or Hepburn's fifth. It's a clenched, tinny performance, i. e. true to life and hard to take for more than a few minutes at a time. Fortunately, Kate/Cate makes an early exit, albeit not soon enough for me. What was the point of her character, anyway? If she's supposed to represent Hughes' truest object of desire, she doesn't have the air-speed velocity.
The film does improve as it goes on, reversing the Hughes experience in life. The climax is a hearing held by Brewster in which both Alda and DiCaprio show how good this film might have been had it cut out the starlets and the flying montages and just gotten to the part where Hughes takes on the country and Pan-American Airways while his growing mental issues gnaw away at him. Watching Brewster switch from wolf to sheep as Hughes finds his footing is a joy.
Even in this section, though, Scorsese spends long minutes on DiCaprio raging and writhing alone in the nude in order to let us know he's really suffering, not trusting his actor to show us the same thing in numerous small moments where the story is being advanced as well.
The film is never boring, just muddled and straining at a significance it doesn't reach. Like one of Hughes' most famous creations, the giant airplane nicknamed the "Spruce Goose" which "The Aviator" climaxes with, what you have here is an overloaded creation that struggles to get in the air, and doesn't stay up long.