The Aviator and 2004's Best Films

The Aviator and 2004's Best Films
by Steve Finkelstein

The Aviator is one of the best films of 2004; thus, the first part of my article neatly fits into the second part. This would have pleased Howard Hughes, who is the subject of The Aviator. The billionaire suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, an often crippling psychological condition, whose sufferers engage in maddening “anal-retentive” rituals to make many aspects of their lives an orderly “fit.” Not having OCD, the fact that the two parts of this article were able to fit together was mere coincidence. (That, along with the fact that I washed my hands with hot soap and water for six hours to kill all the damned germs that interfered with my writing, brought about a fortunate result.) Anyway, enough about me—let’s get down to the review:

The Aviator—Martin Scorsese’s biopic is not only one of the most entertaining films of the year, but it’s also one of its best looking. The film charts Howard Hughes rise to power from 1927-1947. Most of the action takes place in Los Angeles, and the film’s meticulous and beautiful production design makes the viewer feel like they are actually there. The film is an homage to the lavish widescreen movie epics of the 50’s and early 60’s that Scorsese so dearly loves. He must have leapt at the chance to direct this project, particularly since a large portion of this film deals with Hughes early exploits as an ambitious film producer/director, while at the same time shtupping dozens of beautiful
Hollywood starlets.

Scorsese probably knows more about motion picture history than anyone on the planet, and he must have had a hell of a time directing these sequences. Besides being a phenomenal film scholar, Scorsese is arguably the most accomplished film director on technical and aesthetic levels, and The Aviator is an excellent vehicle to display the director’s technical virtuosity. Watching this film brought to mind another director whose great skills put on the screen the life of another iconoclastic innovator; that film was Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 film Tucker, the story of the maverick auto designer. Like Scorsese, Coppola used his film as a vehicle to display his directing
magic and love of classic Hollywood films. If you haven’t caught this excellent film, I urge you to rent it.

Getting back to The Aviator, the acting in the film is first rate. Leonardo Di Caprio is very good as Hughes, as is Alec Baldwin who plays Juan Trippe, the head of Pan-Am airways and a business nemesis of Hughes. Still, as good as these performers are, the film is stolen from them by two fine performances: Alan Alda as a corrupt U.S. senator and another nemesis of Hughes, and particularly Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn, the one true love of Hughes’ life. Alda delivers a performance of calculated and oily insidiousness as he tries to topple Hughes empire and he’s terrific, as is Blanchett, who portrays Hepburn with just the right note of manic eccentricity. Both performances are worthy of Oscar nominations.

The Aviator has two masterful sequences that display Scorsese’s directing magic: the near fatal plane crash Hughes suffered in 1947 as he was flying a spy plane that he designed for the government, and a sequence where’s Hughes’ OCD reaches insane levels, brought about by the possible collapse of his business empire due to government investigations. Hughes reacts to this threat by locking himself in a movie screening room for weeks, at which point his OCD really kicks in. What's terrific about these sequences is that they are polar opposites: the crash takes place in the vast open skies, superbly showing the horror of such an event as the plane slams into several Beverly Hills homes, while the screening room sequence talks place in a tightly confined area, and vividly displays the claustrophobic terror of Hughes descending into OCD madness. No one but Scorsese could handle these sequences so masterfully.

Speaking of OCD, that is perhaps the film’s one true flaw—while the movie vividly shows the symptoms of that mental disease, it doesn’t satisfactorily explain the origins of how Hughes acquired this terrible illness. There is a sequence at the beginning that takes place in Hughes’ childhood, which attempts to explain the beginnings of his disorder, but the scene is superficial at best, as the film rushes ahead ten years to Hughes’ adult life. Because of this, Hughes character in the film has a certain shallowness, which may make it difficult for some to empathize with him. Scorsese may have done this because he primarily designed the film as an entertainment, rather than a serious study of mental illness (as he did in his early great film Taxi Driver). Still, even with this flaw, The Aviator is an excellent film.

And now, without further ado, let’s cut to the chase, let’s hear that drum roll...my list of the best and worst of cinema 2004:

2004’s best films (in order of merit)
Sideways
Fahrenheit 9/11
Million Dollar Baby
Kinsey
Vera Drake
The Aviator
Ray
Spider-Man 2
Team America: World Police

2004’s worst film (in order of no merit)
Alien Vs. Predator

All of the above films have been previously reviewed at this site; to read any of these reviews, please click here.

Good moviegoing to everyone and I’ll see ya soon.

Steve can be reached at steve@babblog.com.