The Aviator
The poet William Carlos Williams once wrote, "The pure products of America go crazy," a line that was later quoted by rock critic Greil Marcus in a well-known essay about Elvis Presley. For good reason: It gets right to the mix of ambition, excess, and weirdness that fuels greatness in this country, not just in Elvis, but in Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Joan Crawford, Truman Capote, George Patton, Marlon Brando, Kurt Cobain, Billie Holiday -- all our domestic gods and goddesses.
Howard Hughes was as pure a product as this country has come up with, and as crazy as a bedbug too. A rare combination of daredevil pilot and movie visionary, he inherited a family tool company at 18, bent Hollywood to his will in his 20s, broke the world speed record at 30, revolutionized the airline industry in his 40s, and, famously, aged into a demented germaphobic recluse in his late 60s, with 6-inch fingernails and Kleenex boxes on his feet.
Now Miramax's Harvey Weinstein -- also pretty pure in these matters -- has bankrolled a new movie about Hughes by Martin Scorsese (a product of the movies, which isn't quite the same thing). "The Aviator" stars Leonardo DiCaprio, who's a sleek dynamo as the young Hughes and believably bullheaded and distraught as early middle age and obsessive-compulsive disorder kick in. The film also features Cate Blanchett in a tour de force impersonation of Katharine Hepburn at the height of her 1930s angularity and, for a while, is as busy and accurate a portrait of Hollywood at the height of the studio system as has ever been filmed.
But "The Aviator" (opening tomorrow) has its dark side as well, and not just because Scorsese and writer John Logan have rearranged the furniture of Hughes's life to, say, bring on Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) several years ahead of schedule or whisk Henry Kaiser, Hughes's partner on the ill-fated Spruce Goose seaplane, into the dustbin of history.
Simply put, as its hero loses his way, so does the movie. After a glittering first half that deals with Hughes's obsessive tinkering on his 1930 World War I film "Hell's Angels" and his fraught romance with Hepburn, "Aviator" sees mental illness descend even as Hughes fights to break the iron grip of Pan American Airways over the country's transatlantic commercial flight routes.
Read that last clause again. Does it sound like the stuff of drama? It isn't, and casting Alec Baldwin as Pan Am CEO Juan Trippe and Alan Alda as a US senator in Trippe's pocket doesn't make it any more interesting. "Aviator" has the triumph-and-fall shape of many modern "Great Man" movies, including the much-abused "Alexander," but Scorsese, like Oliver Stone, hasn't decided what exactly that means. Yes, the pure products of America go crazy. But why?
So the last hour becomes a beautifully filmed catalog of disordered events: Hughes struggles to get the Spruce Goose off the ground, crashes his XF-11 plane in the middle of Beverly Hills (a terrifying sequence), finds himself unable to stop repeating phrases or to touch men's room doorknobs (DiCaprio nails the helplessness and panic of what we now call OCD), rails against Pan Am's strong-arming of his Trans World Airlines, breaks down completely, comes back to wage war on Capitol Hill -- and by then whatever momentum the film has built has dissipated. "The Aviator" screeches to a halt in 1947 for no apparent reason, leaving out Hughes's purchase of RKO Studios in the 1950s and his long, sad decline. The film, even more than the life, is anticlimactic.
Compounding the tragedy, the first half -- covering Hughes's high-flying Hollywood years -- is an incredibly filmed treat. Old-movie freak that he is, Scorsese has fashioned a portrait of early Hollywood at its zenith, with cameos by Errol Flynn (Jude Law), Jean Harlow (singer Gwen Stefani, blink and you'll miss her), MGM head Louis B. Mayer (Stanley DeSantis), and Hughes's teen discovery/mistress Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner). You get the sense of a creative community working all day and playing all night until no one can tell the two apart.
In DiCaprio's soft-spoken yet intensely smart performance, Hughes moves through this world like a conquering maverick, the sort of man people laugh at until he has a hit. Even so, his eccentricity is legion, and it finds its match in Hepburn. Blanchett can't pass for the great Kate, obviously -- no one can, since Hepburn was both unique and extreme -- but she has fun with the accent and the brusque attitude, and it becomes the sort of showboating performance the late star herself might admire. You can feel Hughes stop and marvel at this glamorous oddity, and you don't blame him one bit.
There's a beautiful scene, based in fact, in which Hepburn takes Hughes East to meet her Connecticut clan. The weekend's a disaster -- the Hepburns are yappy, free-thinking elites who have no use for a tongue-tied California businessman -- and it marks the point in "The Aviator" where Hughes starts receding from the world. But it's also where the director begins to lose control of his movie.
Will anyone notice? There is at the moment a painfully urgent desire among many people to give Scorsese an Oscar for best director. If they could will it into physical fact, they would. Harvey Weinstein has done the next best thing by backing the filmmaker's recent efforts and doing everything short of personally cleaning the scum off the sides of Academy members' pools.
That is why advance word and early awards would have you believe this is it -- the film that will finally deliver on the commercial and artistic hopes of Marty lovers everywhere (which is to say movie lovers, for they're the same thing). But "Gangs of New York" wasn't what Scorsese does best, and neither is "The Aviator." As luscious as the filmmaking craft here is, it lacks the rude vitality, the unpredictability, the pure American craziness of the films that should have won him the Oscar: "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," and "GoodFellas." It is as tidy and assured as Howard Hughes hoped life might be, and to the same effect.
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