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.—***1/2
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. |
