I just got back from Scorsese's latest. Overall, I was impressed. I thought Leonardo DiCaprio was just fine as Hughes, digging into his heroics and hysteria with equal aplomb; Cate Blanchett scored a direct hit as Katharine Hepburn, even if she (and pretty much everyone else in the cast) didn't resemble the person she was playing (she got the essentials right, though, like DiCaprio); and I loved the tough, no-nonsense way Ava Gardner was portrayed, even if I don't much care for Kate Beckinsale, a once-fetching English rose who's wilted in the Hollywood sun. [Gwen Stefani's Harlow and Jude Law's Errol Flynn aren't around long enough to make much of an impression--the awkwardly cast Stefani gets maybe two lines, which may have been more than she could handle.] Scorsese keeps everything moving (maybe the hardest thing to do in a three-hour biopic, as Oliver Stone can attest) and I appreciated DP Robert Richardson's replication of three-strip Technicolor in the early scenes, even if most audiences will be baffled by the blue peas Hughes eats.

I was wondering, though, about the film's ambivalent-to-harsh treatment of Faith Domergue, who I always liked from her 50s monster movies. Did she and Hughes really meet when she was 15? [They seem to meet in the mid-40s, by which time she was at least 20.] I don't think she made any films with him till she was 26. And did she really go on a car-smashing rampage when Hughes threw her over? She always seemed so level-headed as a movie scientist and not so much of a "bunglaow broad." Oh, well; maybe the particulars were all "telescoped."

Still, it's good entertainment, which is no more and no less what Scorsese intended it to be. Dante Ferretti's luxurious period production design is spot-on and while the flying scenes are somewhat compromised by obvious CGI but the big one, the Beverly Hills crash, is terrific. His treatment of Hughes' OCD seemed to unnerve one audience member, who fled for the lobby everytime Hughes had one of his compulsive handwashing tsuris. Too close for comfort, maybe?

Aviator is a good movie but far from the great movie it is being heralded as. I found the overall narrative, arc, and basic structure of the movie rambled. It didn't feel at all like it had one common thread to carry me from one scene to the next, to immerse me in the movie... and when I say thread there is that sort of invisible note thats like a string that through each scene of a movie carries me along - either pushing me deeper into whats going on or making me more detached. As such the pacing of the movie felt more like a made for tv biopic... it jumps from a new situation then builds and builds and suddenly switches to a new situation - so it feels like a song that you cannot differentiate between its verse and chorus. The production value of the movie is astounding, the acting is commanding largely, and recreation of nostalgia is very well done... but this alone doesn't make it a great movie, sure its great in places and certains performances standout... but to put this movie on the level of an instant classic is a bit of a stretch in my mind. Where is the love of Hughes's life Jean Peters... why are not the beginnings of Hughes's love for planes or movies shown? Why are some climatic sequences shown restrained (when Hughes nails points in his defense in the hearings and other places)? If there had been more of a buildup to what Hughes was about perhaps the movie would be much stronger... its like a movie that starts in the middle of the usual biopic and skips the beginning in large part.

Several times in this movie I wanted to get on the movie director intercom system and say "Paging Martin Scorsese... paging the Martin Scorsese who did Raging Bull... paging the Martin Scorsese who did Taxi Driver."

Kate Beckinsale is heart poundingly stunning as Ava Gardner... everytime she appeared I was hoping Scott Baio and Willie Aames from Zapped! (1982) would jump out to use their telekinetic powers.

I would not be surprised to see Leo DiCaprio win for best actor for his performance as Howard Hughes here. He didn't at all seem to play it safe... he just went for it and became Hughes and thankfully never taking me out of the movie that he was just DiCaprio playing a slight variation of previous characters.

Cate Blanchett was very good in her turn as Katharine Hepburn. Though its a bit sad that so many people of today will not be familiar w/ Katharine Hepburn onscreen and off to trully know how great Cate has captured her essence and quirks.

Willem Dafoe was Willem Dafoe... though it was a bit of a jolt to see him not being a German, having just seen him in Life Aquatic.

Jude Law was just cool as Errol Flynn. In one scene it looked he threw a full on flush punch at someone... and everytime Jude Law popped up in the movie he looked *really* completely trashed and drunk, which was very refreshing and a bit of fun naughtiness to his capturing of Errol Flynn.

I was a bit surprised in the end credits to see that Brent Spiner was in it... I completely missed him.

The Beverly Hills plane crash is amazing. Definitely one of the all time best plane crashes sequences in a movie... I seriously doubt I will ever fly on American Eagle again after seeing this scene. This scene alone is worth seeing the movie at a theater as its intense sound design will make it hard to blast at home or the apt without everyone around you thinking ET has just crash landed at your place.

If you have germ phobia, the type that washes their hands more than a doctor (and your not a doctor) as well as you have some obsessive compulsive perfection tendencies... many scenes in Aviator are going to be done so painstakingly overbearing accurate in this regard that you might have to leave the theater. There were people so shocked by this in the audience I saw this with that they were throwing up.

Overall the movie cannot escape its script, which has a in parts good middle, no beginning and a casual ending. The actors and crew and director and cinematographer make the most of the script but overall its much more bland than it ever should be... with so many brilliant sequences like the Beverly Hills crash and blue peas scene... and downward spiral of Hughes... this movie is falls far short of its aims, not out of passion but out of the material it references.

. . . I had a very good time with THE AVIATOR, perhaps as much fun as Scorsese seemed to have putting it together - it all appeared rather joyful (regarding what he could do with cinema) and loose . . . kind of nice seeing him use his exceptional directorial talent "just" to put on a quality show ("A job of work" in John Ford's phrase), rather than feeling the need to say something particularly important every time he gets behind the camera (or the video monitor) . . . regarding Faith Domergue, according to THE FILM ENCYCLOPEDIA, she was 21 in 1946 when she made her first movie (if THE AVIATOR was correct, Hughes kept her under wraps for quite a few years) . . . she did tell her side of the story in something called MY LIFE WITH HOWARD HUGHES which was published in 1972 (never read it) . . .

*Slight Spoilers in this post*





I saw The Aviator on Christmas Day (I actually didn't know that Christmas was such a busy moviegoing day, part of the reason the theater was crowded may have been because it fell on a Saturday this year), and while I wouldn't put in the top tier of Scorsese films, I liked it for the most part and I'll probably give it another viewing in the near future. It had the usual biopic problems (in particular, it almost felt like the movie didn't really end but just sort of stopped) and it occasionally felt a little bit long, but there was still a lot that I liked and I generally had a good time with it. I thought that Oliver Stone/Casino/Bringing Out the Dead/Kill Bill DP Robert Richardson did nice work on this film (even if I got slightly tired of the weird, almost Guy Maddin-like blue/pink three-strip technicolor look of the first hour or so of the movie, I heard more than one person in the theater comment on the blue peas) and I would like for him to get a best cinematography nomination. (Same goes for Dante Ferretti for his production design)
Most of the cast did a good job, even if I never really got used to Iam Holm's German accent (it was a little disappointing to see Willem Dafoe show up only briefly as a detective, I think this is the first time Scorsese and Dafoe have worked together since The Last Temptation of Christ). John Logan didn't do a bad job of scripting the film (the contribution of the credited screenwriter is sometimes a little difficult to discern), but I wonder how it would've turned out if Paul Schrader had scripted.

I think that Gangs of New York is still my favorite recent Scorsese film, but I think that The Aviator is a worthy addition to his body of work, and I'm interested in seeing his DiCaprio-starring remake of Infernal Affairs. A remake of a recent Hong Kong movie seems like a somewhat odd choice of a project for Scorsese, but I'm willing to give it a chance.

Spiner played Robert Grossman, one of the two men who proposes the idea of the Celestial planes to Hughes. He was the one DiCaprio told he had something on his shirt and made him wipe it off.

Well, you are all so much more generous towards this film than I am. Following are the thoughts I typed up right after getting home from seeing it tonight.

So where were the bathroom attendants?
(More on that later)

What kind of story was Scorsese (and his team) trying to tell in THE AVIATOR? The story of a Hollywood filmmaker? The story of a womanizer? The story of an aviation pioneer? Of an industrialist? Of a descent into madness? Of a David-and-Goliath struggle of lone entrepreneur vs. secret collusion between government and monopoly? Or all of these? Well, if all of them, then how does one integrate all these threads into a coherent narrative? And what ultimately does it tell us about its subject? What, in fact, is this movie ABOUT? Well, I don’t know the answers to any of these questions and I’ve just come from seeing the movie. And I’m not sure Scorsese and company would know either.

There’s a lot about the Hughes saga that makes for a fascinating story. Very little of what fascinates me about Hughes appeared in this movie. I’d have to say that the scenes that worked best for me were those that showed Hughes behind the wheel of a plane. He comes most alive there. But there are so few of such scenes. Maybe that’s the story they should have focused on and shunted “Kate Hepburn” and “Ava Gardner” and “Errol Flynn” to the cutting room floor where they belonged. We can always see the “real” Hepburn and Harlow and Gardner and Flynn on TCM. (I'm sorry, but I thought the celebrity impersonations were just awful. Just unbearable.)

But even the flying scenes, as technically impressive as they are, are undone by the central flaw at the heart of the movie—the miscasting of Leonardo DiCaprio. Sure, he tries real hard and he seems to have poured his heart and soul into it, but he’s still baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio and not Howard Hughes. He tries so hard to “be” Hughes that it shows in every frame. From beginning to end, he’s "acting," not “being.” Towards the end, he starts looking a little more like Hughes; perhaps near the end of the shoot he was finally growing into the role. (If they’d started making the movie in earnest then, and showed Hughes in the 1950s, they might have come up with something better.)

But I never got a handle on Hughes from this movie. On what kind of person he was. On what motivated him. Or why people stayed loyal to him even though he was clearly going mad while pouring millions of dollars down the drain--some of it the taxpayers’, some of it his own--or at least that’s what the film would have us believe. Or why Hepburn and Gardner would hang around him as long as they did, which, of course, they did not do in real life. (I kept asking myself during the Hepburn scenes, when is Spencer Tracy gonna show up, and he eventually does, although I mistook him for George Stevens! During the Gardner scenes, I kept asking myself, wasn’t she married to Mickey Rooney at this time, and wasn’t she married to Artie Shaw by this point and wasn’t she married to Sinatra by now. The timeline of this movie is all screwed up, but to try and chart it would take up a whole other post.)

I was distracted by the two-color Technicolor used in roughly the first quarter or so of the movie. Scorsese’s reported aim was to replicate the color of the period in which the movie was taking place. But three-color Technicolor appeared in 1932 (Disney’s “Flowers and Trees,” anyone?) and began to be used in features in 1934, yet the two-color look continues in THE AVIATOR right up through 1939.

The constant, inappropriate use of period recordings was extremely irritating. And Howard Shore’s incidental music was no better. Was this a rush job?

But if I had to pinpoint where the movie most taxed my patience it would be in the many scenes I found utterly distasteful. Did we really need to see a naked, bearded Hughes alone in a screening room surrounded by discarded Kleenex and urinating into milk bottles? Aren’t there private moments that don’t belong in a biopic? Like those scenes in the bathrooms. Do we really need to see someone freaking out over soap and germs and towels and cuts and stains in a bathroom? And at such length? And, back to my first question: Where were the bathroom attendants? Both of these scenes occurred in high-class nightclubs at peak hours and there is every evidence of a bathroom attendant on duty. So where did they mysteriously vanish to? This kind of stuff bothers me to the point where I just get completely taken out of the movie. What was the point of these scenes anyway? To show his germ-phobia? Didn’t the same point get driven home in so many other spots? Why the overkill?

I'm sorry, but I'm gonna stick with THE CARPETBAGGERS and DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. Now THOSE are Howard Hughes movies! B)

"I'm sorry, but I'm gonna stick with THE CARPETBAGGERS and DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. Now THOSE are Howard Hughes movies! "

Hey, don't go forgetting THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA! Hmm, whose could be the true identity behind mysterious, reclusive magnate D.D.Denham...? :D

THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA! What an odd coincidence. I just got that film for Christmas as part of a "Cult Horror Film Collection" 2-disc DVD set (which lists it as COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDES). Now I know what I'M gonna watch for New Year's. Thanks for pointing out the "Hughes" connection. :o

MAYBE SPOILERS here:

I've now seen the film twice. The second time was at Baltimore's lovely Art Deco Senator Theatre, which in a pleasing coincidence shares a parking lot with the church I'm to be married in this August. I saw the film with my bride-to-be's family, who are by no means movie people, and they all enjoyed it. "I don't know anything about Howard Hughes except his crazy years in seclusion," was a typical comment, and I think that's why Scorsese made the picture, to reclaim his heroic achievements in filmmaking and aviation--but not in an overly heroic way. There's a bit of Jake LaMotta and a lot of Lefty Rosenthal (CASINO) in the film's Hughes, and at the end--when, for the first time as I recall, his OCD rears its ugly head after a triumph and not a setback--there's no turning back the darkness that had been with him since childhood.

I've seen enough biopics now not to be too obsessive-compulsive when it comes to timelines and the like, though certain compressions and elisions and ill-fitting casting (yes, this film's Spencer Tracy) bother me. [And it's not unbelievable to me that Ava Gardner would be juggling two or three men at a time.] It's funny that some critics felt that the movie spent way too much time in the air, and that others found a second or third trip to the washroom too much to bear. [I read that an OCD association has praised the film for its realistic depiction of the affliction. It's on the record that Hughes was a sufferer, and its depiction was no more or less upsetting to me than the various depradations of Ray Charles and Alfred Kinsey in their current biopics. I didn't feel like he was being exploited for my amusement, which has been done plenty of times by others since his death.]

Biopics are tough, and not my favorite genre (the best is a fake, CITIZEN KANE, of course). The worthiest skirt the worst of the flaws and convey something of the flavor of the people and the period that's being recreated, and on this level I found THE AVIATOR to be a success. [It reminded me a little of Coppola's buoyant TUCKER, with Dean Stockwell's Hughes. And speaking of Hughes, I've just rented the Tommy Lee Jones TV movie THE AMAZING HOWARD HUGHES, so I'll have to see how that stacks up.]

On a related note, it may be that THE AVIATOR simply stands out for me by being better than anything I've seen this Christmas season, one of the weakest in recent memory. There are a lot of resistible pictures out there, which means a harsher winter than usual as we enter the Jan-Feb dead zone.