THE AVIATOR
DIRECTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE
DON'T TELL ME I can't do it. Don't tell me it can't be done." So says Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, a biography of the aerospace mogul and filmmaker. The movie is notable for many reasons, not all of them heartening. Like Oliver Stone's biography Alexander, Scorsese's latest starts with golden images of the young hero being bathed by his mother, then goes on to tell of a visionary whose dreams came true, but only up to a point, and whose efforts were hampered by tragic flaws and small-minded foes. The films have one other thing in common: They mirror their directors' desire to make blockbuster art, and illustrate the difficulties of doing it well.
Alexander is a richer work—muscular, lyrical and tender. Stone's love and respect for his hero is so great that it becomes the movie's animating force. It's filled with primal images—a hawk's-eye view of clashing armies; a slow motion, profile long shot of a horse facing off against an elephant (an unscripted moment caught, newsman-style, by one of Stone's cameramen). The film's suggestion that Alexander's conquests presaged 20 centuries of ego-driven imperialism is as politically resonant as anything in Godard's Notre Musique, and subtler, too.
It has grave flaws, but many of them come from being a movie so huge that it has to make certain concessions, and to his credit, Stone either subverts the concessions or puts them to work. The film's refusal to visualize Alexander's homosexuality (all hugs and pie-eyed stares) as explicitly as it does his heterosexuality (Rosario Dawson, stripped to thrill) is lame, but Stone compensates by refusing to judge ancient Greek sexuality by 21st-century American standards, and by describing the love between men in soaring language. The ready-for-PBS framing device, starring Anthony Hopkins' Ptolemy and his maps, is there to help viewers who aren't familiar with the period, but the resourceful director makes it do double-duty as an exploration of how legends are sustained. Stone was not able to turn Colin Farrell's performance into an asset, however; the actor's name helped secure a good part of the film's $150 million budget, but his callow and unthreatening demeanor—like Matthew McConaughey with a brogue—almost sinks it.
Such catch-22s come with the territory, a fact that eluded detractors of Scorsese's Gangs of New York, an ambitious eastern western harmed by studio interference (Miramax reportedly made Scorsese cut an hour) and by DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, whose anachronistic performances harmed the movie their superstar names helped fund. Yet Gangs is still a formidable work, full of flourishes that transform rhetoric into spectacle; think of that dockside tracking shot that shows a ship disgorging new immigrant men, who then sign up for citizenship and army service while Union army coffins are being loaded onto the same boat. And throughout, it is clearly, delightfully a Scorsese movie—an expose of American ruthlessness wrapped in a pulpy revenge melodrama. The Aviator is an equally massive undertaking. But it's warmer, sweeter. At times it gets close to being a crowd pleaser.
Which isn't to say Hughes is cuddly. He has a Kane-like mix of genius, charm, arrogance and opacity, and in the movie's last half, his mind deteriorates and he becomes a revolting specter of his former self, spending whole days in his projection room, yammering nonsense and pissing into bottles. Yet the mere choice of time, place and subject matter automatically makes The Aviator Scorsese's most industry-safe film—the one most likely to win him an Oscar. The tale unfolds mostly in and around Old Hollywood, which in itself generates intense nostalgic feelings among certain Oscar voters (even though Scorsese depicts the place as a gleeful sin pit, just like today).
There are sequences and images that rank with Scorsese's best—Hughes crashing his XF-11 prototype into Beverly Hills, the landing gear ripping tiles from the roofs of mansions; Hughes recoiling like King Kong before news photographers' flashbulbs; Hughes taking paramour Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) on a nighttime plane ride over Southern California, possibly the most romantic screen flight since E.T. Scorsese presages Hughes' disconnect from society by often photographing him from the back—visually the simplest way for a director to indicate a hero's separation from his world. And he sanctifies Hughes' misery by photographing the naked DiCaprio lying on the projection-room floor in fetal position while dogfight footage tattoos his torso—a man-boy mogul as Christ figure, scourged by his love of airplanes and movies.
Yet the film's real source of interest isn't Hughes (who never comes across as more than a brilliant, mentally ill manchild) but the parallels between filmmaker and subject. Scorsese presents Hughes as an obsessive dreamer who only pretends to enjoy social situations, who's deeply unhappy when he's not working, who has a size fetish and a fondness for perfect surfaces, and whose fastidiousness will mutate into phobia. (The scenes in the Coconut Grove bathroom, where Hughes suffers panic attacks and scrubs his hands raw, are lit a ghastly green and bracketed with rectilinear master shots that echo the bathroom scenes in The Shining and Full Metal Jacket.)
It's significant that Scorsese first depicts the adult Hughes not as a businessman or aviator, but as a visionary director. Our initial glimpse of Hughes is on the set of his privately funded World War I melodrama Hell's Angels, which took so long to shoot that by the time he was done, sound had come in and he had to shoot the whole thing again. Charmingly, Scorsese doesn't just joke about Hughes' lifelong size fetish, he implicates himself as a sympathizer. Hughes draws a sketch of his gargantuan transport plane the Hercules, aka the Spruce Goose, on the back of a headshot of Jane Russell, the top-heavy star of Hughes' The Outlaw—a good joke that links an artist's creativity and sex drive. At a Coconut Grove party, Hughes insists 24 cameras aren't enough to film a dogfight sequence, and is offended when a studio boss declines to loan him two more.
"Why don't you try making do with what you have?" an underling asks Hughes.
"What I have isn't enough," the mogul insists, echoing the private belief of movie directors everywhere. "Not for how I see it."
The line reveals Scorsese's predicament in Hollywood. He's a dreamer who wants to work big, and that means accepting interference (Harvey Weinstein) he wouldn't normally permit. He's been making epics or near-epics ever since Goodfellas, but as the budgets have ballooned, the concessions have grown more numerous. DiCaprio is the worst concession yet. In The Aviator, as in Gangs, he is a walking, talking catch-22: a funding magnet who drags the whole movie down. Like Natalie Portman, DiCaprio is a former child star who's become less distinctive with age, and like Tom Cruise, you're always aware of how hard he's working. With his reedy voice, Ross Perot-like accent, smooth face and skinny chest, he seems more a teen impressionist than a grown-up movie star. That puts him at a disadvantage dealing with such formidable women as Hepburn (convincingly portrayed by Blanchett, who gets the actress' life force, if not her accent) and makes other characters' fear and awe of Hughes less credible.
Like Alexander, The Aviator is fueled, and somewhat redeemed, by its director's overwhelming identification with his subject. Scorsese understands Hughes' desire to command the respect of Hollywood, the airline business and the U.S. government, all of which were inclined to treat Hughes as a talented but scruffy interloper. Scorsese's oft-thwarted desire to make epics and win Oscars is an artist's translation device that enables Scorsese to understand his cagey, striving heroes. From Mean Streets through Gangs, Scorsese has always identified with characters that work their way inside social structures that would normally ignore them—outsider-insiders who never quite feel a part of the organization to which they theoretically belong.
The Aviator moves this notion to the foreground, and for all its skill, you're aware you're watching a Scorsese movie for people who don't like Scorsese movies. In some ways, it feels like the answer to a pro forma request from some mythical panel of Oscar voters: "Tell us who you are and why you think you deserve this award, and be sure to answer respectfully." The Aviator is all about a man who wants to belong to clubs that wouldn't have someone like him as a member—a 160-minute Groucho Marx joke. If this approach results in an Oscar for Scorsese, the irony will be thick indeed. o
