The Aviator
On the way home from the Christmas movie, H.'s mom turned around and said, apropos of the final scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio's Howard Hughes declares jet travel to be "the way of the future" and finds himself compulsively trapped in those words, "I remember when the switch from prop planes to jets." It took me by surprise, and I realized that I'd just seen a history of the present.The best thing about The Aviator is Leonardo DiCaprio's performance, which is convincing throughout, contrary to my low expectations. Using as his masks a Texan accent and an eyebrow crease possibly borrowed from Ethan Hawke in Before Sunset, Leo immediately overcame my fear that he would look too young and supple, too damn Leo, to represent a character who must not only be given a life of his own but rescued from some degree of caricature. But he was there, all along, from cockpit to toenails.
Scorcese has a considerable back of tricks, too; the color process for many—but not all—of the scenes are supersaturated and tweaked, so that the grass on the golf course where Hughes woos Cate Blanchett's Katharine Hepburn is a pale blue, and many other scenes have Technicolor hues. Indeed, the movie never seems to resolve whether Hughes' movies were shot in black and white or saturated color—even Hell's Angels, a film Hughes released in 1930, acquires a brilliant blue when its fiery air crashes are projected against Hughes' fits of addled rage. The Cocoanut Grove scenes are fervid and sensual, with three different Wainwrights singing to the smart set. And while Blanchett's Hepburn makes so deliberate a note that it falls into an uncanny territory between mimicry and parody, Kate Beckinsale's Ava Gardner comes off as a humane, intelligent sexpot, an uncommon bird in movieland.
But all these parts don't make a whole. The Aviator, or at least Hughes' life story, has a great list of ingredients: Hollywood, sex, madness, invention, fast planes crashing, government and industrial intrigue and the technological march of the twentieth century are all his to play with. But after the first hour and a half, the movie turns stagnant. It doesn't know what to do with all this jazz, and settles for a reliable (and in the thick of it, enjoyable) cliche: the brave turning of the table during a confrontational Congressional hearing. (Alan Alda gets all the good senator parts). As much as everybody likes to hate Alec Baldwin (playing Pan Am's senator-buying president), Hughes' victory doesn't seem that hard-earned.
I left thinking that Kinsey's accomplishment, which seems like the minimum for a biopic, was to show how the world changed. The movie contains a good argument that Howard Hughes changed the world. But it doesn't make it.
Manohla Dargis also thinks it fell apart in the middle, and has perceptive things to say about breasts, clouds, big planes and milk.
posted by Josh K-sky at
6:04 PM
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