He flew through the air with the greatest unease
Rich as Croesus, doomed as Icarus, and a few nuts short of a Cracker Jack box. That's how Martin Scorsese sees Howard Hughes in The Aviator, the director's dizzyingly enjoyable epic about the Texas tornado who blew into Hollywood in 1925, made a few movies, a whole lot of whoopee, and a fleet of airplanes that became TWA. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the airman/businessman/madman in Scorsese's sleek epic that covers Hughes' high-flying, hard-crashing life between 1925 and 1947. The film gleams with aluminum fuselages (on the planes) and satin chassis (on the dames). Hughes likes stroking the shiny surfaces of these pleasure machines; so does Scorsese, whose camera loops and swoops with giddy delight through art deco nightclubs and up, up, up over the Sierras.
Rich as Croesus, doomed as Icarus, and a few nuts short of a Cracker Jack box. That's how Martin Scorsese sees Howard Hughes in The Aviator, the director's dizzyingly enjoyable epic about the Texas tornado who blew into Hollywood in 1925, made a few movies, a whole lot of whoopee, and a fleet of airplanes that became TWA.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the airman/businessman/madman in Scorsese's sleek epic that covers Hughes' high-flying, hard-crashing life between 1925 and 1947. The film gleams with aluminum fuselages (on the planes) and satin chassis (on the dames). Hughes likes stroking the shiny surfaces of these pleasure machines; so does Scorsese, whose camera loops and swoops with giddy delight through art deco nightclubs and up, up, up over the Sierras.
The '30s were Hughes' glory years. He had heaps of money (inherited from his father), which fed his filmmaking and plane-building appetites. He also had heaps of phobias (inherited from his mother), which fed his incipient obsessive-compulsive disorder and led to the first of his nervous breakdowns.
As Scorsese tells it in this allegory of an American overachiever, Hughes' life was bigger, faster, higher - a klieg-lit aerial spectacular. In his drive to top prior triumphs, he burnt out his engine.
DiCaprio, who looks not unlike the gangly 6-foot Hughes, is immediately credible as a socially awkward rich kid. And as the movie progresses the actor eerily gets under the skin, and into the tics, of the increasingly eccentric entrepreneur. Though the movie isn't that deep, the furrows in DiCaprio's brow certainly are, the tracks of the extrovert who has receded into introversion. His intensity is equaled by terrific supporting performances from Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda.
Screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator) supplies a classically structured scenario that mythologizes rather than psychologizes his subject.
Logan's Hughes is Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun. And he is a test-pilot phoenix that emerges from its own ashes. And he is a Midas whose filmmaking and aviation pastimes make him pots of gold.
Scorsese further gilds this Hughes with some inside-movies embellishments. For Scorsese, he is a combination-platter Citizen Kane, Tucker, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington who ended up succumbing to some Brian Wilson bad vibrations.
If the movie sounds busy, it is. But it is also Scorsese's most accomplished, most disciplined movie since GoodFellas. His most gorgeous, too, with the peaches'n'strawberries'n'cream palette of early Technicolor films.
The first half of the nearly three-hour film flies by; the second half, like Hughes' psyche, sputters.
In the '30s, Hughes had money, energy and charm to burn. His courtship of Katharine Hepburn (Blanchett) is gracefully told in the syncopated rhythms of an RKO romantic comedy. This pair of loose-limbed, high-strung bluebloods literally take flight from Hollywood hoi-polloi.
Like Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Blanchett does not so much play Hepburn as channel her restless spirit in a performance that makes you think you're actually watching the legendary actress made of steel-reinforced toothpicks. It's a potent supporting turn that raises the acting bar for DiCaprio, who more than meets Blanchett's challenge.
Though the film presents Hepburn as the human love of Hughes' life, it also suggests that the more he knew of women, the more he preferred planes.
The first half of The Aviator is about Hughes' movie and aeronautic flights; its second half is devoted to crashes of the psychological, aeronautical and business kinds.
In 1944, he suffered a paralyzing nervous breakdown, holing up nude in a screening room, preserving his urine in milk bottles. In 1946, he test-piloted the XF-11, which, in the film's most thrilling sequence, and its scariest, tears through a residential section of Beverly Hills, slicing the roofs off of houses like icing off cakes.
And then there are Hughes' epic battles with Pan Am president Juan Trippe (Baldwin as the bloated face of corporate monopoly) and Maine Sen. Owen Brewster (Alda as the shriveled face of political corruption). Hughes' showdown with Brewster at a 1947 Senate hearing is great fun, but like the breakdown, it takes too much screen time.
Scorsese's film ends with the spectacular flight of the Hercules, Hughes' plane with the wingspan of two football fields, a behemoth that is briefly airborne. In Scorsese's version, Hughes' life is a cautionary illustration of ambition, celebrity and gravity. What goes up must come down.
Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.
Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/carrierickey.
The Aviator *** (out of four stars)
Produced by Sandy Climan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Charles Evans Jr., Graham King and Michael Mann, directed by Martin Scorsese, written by John Logan, photography by Robert Richardson, music by Howard Shore, distributed by Miramax Films.
Running time: 2 hours, 49 mins.
Howard Hughes. . . Leonardo DiCaprio
Katharine Hepburn. . . Cate Blanchett
Juan Trippe. . . Alec Baldwin
Senator Brewster. . . Alan Alda
Ava Gardner. . . Kate Beckinsale
Parent's guide: PG-13 (discreet nudity, sexual candor, profanity)
Playing at: area theaters (opens Saturday)