The Aviator

The Aviator

During the last twenty years of his life, Howard Hughes closed himself off from the outside world. He first took up residence in a Las Vegas penthouse, and then moved to a bungalow behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. Being the wealthiest individual on Earth enabled him to buy himself a room which he never left.

In a way, that solitary room was what his life had been all about. But it was not a direct route: As an affluent young man from Texas and heir to his father’s fortune, he made movies and bought airlines; he dated Hollywood’s most beautiful women and lived as a playboy. Had he died in one of the many airplane crashes he survived, Hughes would have been remembered as a golden boy.

“The Aviator,” directed by Martin Scorsese, concentrates on these glory years though we see the shadows falling, as does Hughes himself; some of its most terrifying scenes show him wrestling with his demons; he knows what is normal and sometimes almost seems within reach of it.

“The Aviator” celebrates Scorsese’s passion for locating excitement within a period setting and rekindling some of the glamour he had heard tell of while growing up: It is conceivable that he wanted to be Howard Hughes. Actually, their lives were even somewhat alike: Both underwent heedless ambition coupled with talent while young; both experienced great early success; both had tempestuous love affairs followed by dark periods only with Hughes they grew ever darker, whereas Scorsese has gone on to fully realize his talents.

The film accomplishes this feat by following two storylines that intersect each other throughout. In one storyline everything goes right for Hughes while in another everything goes wrong. Scorsese has shown similar life patterns in “GoodFellas,” “Raging Bull,” “The King of Comedy,” “Casino” even “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Leonardo DiCaprio succeeds at portraying the emotional transformations that come with such contrasting fortunes; playing madness can easily lead to overacting, yet he plays a Hughes who remains controlled or even trapped within his secrets and capable of pretending to be fine while feeling desperate inside.

DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes arrives in Los Angeles as a good looking young man with lots of money, and jumps right into things by directing a World War I aviation film called “Hell’s Angels,” which at the time was the most expensive movie ever made. The industry laughed at him but he finished it and it made money, as did most of his other pictures. As his interest shifted from movies towards the airplanes featured in them, he started designing and building aircrafts, then eventually bought an airline of his own.

Hughes could have had women whenever he wanted them; however, he preferred not to take this easy route. Jean Harlow was not one to be taken for granted, Ava Gardner refused gifts of jewelry (“I am not for sale!”), and during their time together Katharine Hepburn wore the pants in their relationship just as much as he did.

She liked his sense of adventure: she got excited when he let her fly planes; she worried about him; she noticed signs that were indicative of growing eccentricity on his part but then she met Spencer Tracy, and that put an end to all that. He found Jane Russell and invented a bra so pneumatic that her bosom would rise up and down in “The Outlaw”; by the end starlets were being kept on retainer in case he ever called them which he never did.

DiCaprio isn’t anyone’s visual depiction of Hughes (that would be a young Sam Shepard), but he embodies the man’s wild spirit. John C. Reilly plays Noah Dietrich, the unfortunate sidekick who is always sent to mortgage everything for one of Howard’s whims; it seems that Hughes became the world’s richest man by going broke at higher and higher levels.

Scorsese has a good feel for the Hollywood of this period, as when Howard, new in town, approaches mogul L.B. Mayer at the Coconut Grove and asks to borrow two cameras for a big “Hells’ Angels” scene. He already has 24, but they’re not enough. Mayer looks at him the way a child psychiatrist might have regarded the young Jim Carrey. And Scorsese adds subtle continuity: Every time we see Mayer, he seems to be surrounded by the same flunkies.

The women in this movie are all splendidly cast. Cate Blanchett has the task of playing Katharine Hepburn who was so close to caricature that playing her accurately involves some risk and she pulls it off with a performance that is both delightful and touching; mannered and tomboyish; shrewdly outspoken; sizing up Hughes as an easy mark and yet worried about his eccentricities. Kate Beckinsale is Ava Gardner, aware of her power; Gwen Stefani is Jean Harlow, whose stardom eclipses that of the unknown Texas rich boy; Kelli Garner is Faith Domergue (“the next Jane Russell”) at a time when bosoms were paramount in Howard’s life.

Jane Russell doesn’t appear personally in the film, but her cleavage does, in a hilarious scene just before what used to be called the Breen office which was put over Hollywood censorship during those years. Hughes brings his tame meteorology professor (Ian Holm) to testify against cleavage, introduces him as a systems analyst, and has him prove with calipers and mathematics that Russell displays no more cleavage than a control group of five other actresses.

Special effects can distract from a film, or enhance it. Scorsese knows how to use them. There is a thrilling sequence when Hughes crash-lands in Beverly Hills; the wing tip of his plane slices through the walls of houses we have seen only from the inside. And there is much made of the “Spruce Goose,” which inspires Sen.

Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) to charge in congressional hearings that Hughes was a war profiteer; Hughes, already down the spiral to madness, rises to the occasion, defeats Brewster on his own territory and vows that the plane will fly as indeed it does fly, in a CGI sequence that is persuasive and kind of wonderful.

Hughes is enveloped in darkness by the end. He cannot think of what to say; he repeats himself. Eventually, he enters a men’s room and then becomes too germ-phobic to open the door with his bare hand; so he has to wait outside until someone else comes in, and then slip through while the door is still open. His aides especially the long-suffering Dietrich (Alan Alda) do their best to protect him, but finally he vanishes into seclusion.

What sadness here. What bright glory. What an engrossing movie, 166 minutes long, that zips by like 90.There’s a match here between Scorsese and his subject perhaps because the director’s own life journey gives him special understanding of Howard Hughes’ brilliance and madness but also with a bit of distance: The man had everything, even if only for a moment and it was all still too much for him. This is one great picture from this year!

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