The Aviator

Watched the new Marty Scorsese film with an entirely rude audience in my hometown of Irvine, California on Christmas Day. Usually, Christmas Day movie audiences are well-behaved Jews looking for something to do while everything else is closed, but this crowd was rowdy, talkative and didn't seem to be enjoying the movie nearly as much as they should.

I pity them, because they missed one of the year's best films, and I hate them because they decreased my enjoyment just a little bit.



So, yes, The Aviator will definitely be on my list of the year's best films (coming very soon to this very website, I hope!) I didn't like it quite as much as Gangs of New York, possibly because that film is so massive and has a character as alive and intense as Bill the Butcher at its center. But it's an impressively made film, a soaring tragedy about the cost of greatness. Scorsese's Howard Hughes (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in his best performance to date) is a great man because of his outsized ambitions, and his bravery in risking all that he has to see these ambitions realized. But he also pities him, because the world can never live up to the imaginations of dreamers like Hughes, and so his movie ends not in joy and triumph, but in desolation and sorrow.

Like all of Scorsese's protagonists, Hughes lives to achieve everything he could ever want, only to see his fantasies tainted and eventually undone by paranoia, jealousy, greed and hubris. The first hour of the film feels like a rush of adrenaline, like the best sequences in the most fun Scorsese pictures. It's akin to the opening of Goodfellas, when young Henry Hill runs through the streets in his expensive guido suit, high on the power and respect granted to him by his mob associations. Howard Hughes inherits his money from his dead parents, sure, but it's his direction of Hell's Angels, his aircraft designs and his constant drive and ambition that earns him his noteriety.

Scorsese takes his time setting up Howard's success, introducing him to the world Hollywood's rich and powerful elite with some of the most luminous faux Technicolor cinematography imaginable. Between this and Kill Bill 2, Robert Richardson has comfirmed himself in 2004 as one of our finest working cinematographers. The Aviator recreates the feeling of old Hollywood epics down to every last detail.

And speaking of vivid, remarkable recreations, Cate Blanchett's Katherine Hepburn is the greatest performance given by any actor, male or female, this year. She remakes Hepburn from the inside out, fitting her voice into that sharp Connecticut argot while investing this outsized woman into reality in a way the screwball comedies of the 30's never could. In the film, Hughes meets Hepburn and is immediately taken with her. Though he would notoriously cheat on her with a variety of young starlets and wannabes, and go on to romance Ava Gardner (here played enchantingly by the stunningly beautiful Kate Beckinsale), The Aviator presents Hepburn as the center of Hughes' romantic world, the only woman who could ever keep up with his wild exuberant imagination. A late scene between the two of them, spoken entirely between a wall with Hughes already sealed off from the world in an advanced state of delusional paranoia, proves so heartbreaking and personal, it's nearly unthinkable that the subjects are two of the greatest icons of the 20th Century.

Earlier in the film, during their initial courtship, Hepburn tells Hughes that they are not like other people, and are unfit to mingle in common society. "Too many acute angles, too many eccentricities," is how she puts it, and it's an apt description. As Hughes invests in TWA (eventually buying a controlling share of the company), and takes on Pan Am mogul Juan Trippe (a delightfully menacing Alec Baldwin), he finds himself suddenly unable to deal with the spotlight on his personal life, and the demands of living as a public figure. This man, who in one scene smashes an experimental spy plane into a Beverly Hills neighborhood, and in another accompanies Jean Harlow to the premiere of his own film, the most expensive of all time, begins to come apart from all the attention, driven mad by small fears, of germs and clammy handshakes and spoiled milk.

Scorsese is at the peak of his powers in these sequences, showing a man who knows and understands that he is being driven to madness by isolation and paranoia, but who is helpless to resist his bizarre urges. I was reminded of Jake LaMotta, knowing his brother has not slept with his wife even as he makes the accusation. Or Henry Hill, snorting his own stuff even though Paulie, Jimmy and everyone else told him not to start using drugs. Men of power, men of tremendous ability, who still cannot withstand their inner demons, their feelings of predestined failure. The Aviator joins these other films as one of Scorsese's most gripping examinations of this timeless narrative.

And this is not even mentioning the aviation sequences themselves, surely among the most impressive ever filmed. We open with the shooting of Hell's Angels, a remarkably complicated war film involving the use of dozens of recreated planes and an unheard-of-at-the-time 24 cameras. But the film also includes the aforementioned Beverly Hills crash landing, the breaking of a speed barrier, and the flight of the Hercules (nee the Spruce Goose) in Long Beach Harbor. Scorsese uses computer generated effects in these sequences to give us a genuine feeling for Hughes' love of flight, and the freedom it allowed him. Some of the aerial photography is truly breathtaking.