The Aviator (Martin Scorsese, 2004)
The Aviator sees one of the most celebrated of living filmmakers chronicle the life of one of the twentieth century’s most extravagant and flamboyant figures. Howard Hughes has been an obvious and tempting topic for ages: there has already been one film biography, the 1977 The Amazing Howard Hughes, with Tommy Lee Jones (which I haven’t seen), and Spielberg was kicking around Hughes as a subject with William Goldman and Warren Beatty back in the early 1990s. The Aviator is a somewhat old-fashioned, straightforward biopic, and it will never make a list of Scorsese’s greatest movies, but it’s a highly polished and engaging movie that for the most part overcomes some flaws in its screenplay.
Hughes’ astonishing life has so many facets that it provides almost too much for any one film, and The Aviator wisely narrows its focus to his relatively early years, starting with his epic production of the film Hell’s Angels in the late 1920s, and taking the story through to his test flight of the “Spruce Goose” in the late 1940s. His loopy-as-an-airshow later years (in which he became one of the world’s most determined recluses) aren’t covered, although they are heavily foreshadowed: the film takes him from gregarious playboy to an obsessive eccentric. It’s a story filled with big name characters (Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, Jean Harlow), and Scorsese’s reputation has secured a deep cast to give the film that old-fashioned big epic feel. In addition to Leonardo Di Caprio as Hughes and Cate Blanchett as Hepburn, the film features Alec Baldwin, John C Reilly, Jude Law, Alan Alda, Ian Holm, Kate Beckinsale, Edward Herrmann and Willem Dafoe in a range of often small parts.
Spielberg was onto something casting Di Caprio to play younger than his real age in Catch Me if You Can: Scorsese’s gamble that Di Caprio could also play an older man is much less successful. Di Caprio’s boyish handsomeness is fine as the dashing 1920s Hughes, but he never looks right as the postwar Hughes later in the film. Di Caprio’s good looks have become his curse as he looks for more serious roles, which is a shame, because his actual performance here is excellent. He catches both Hughes’ glamour and his struggle against the creeping mental degradation that would gradually steal his personal life from him. It is Blanchett’s Oscar-winning performance as Hepburn, however, that stands out. Blanchett is very broad in her impersonation of Hepburn, but she has layered her performance with more subtle variations that evoke the person beneath the mannerisms. The sequences between the two are the best in the film, exploring how their relationship was built on their mutual need for a partner who could withstand their own eccentricities. Hepburn’s long and illustrious career, of course, shows how she triumphed over her own outsider status and turned her rough edges to her advantage, in marked contrast to Hughes’ grotesque decline. Her presence therefore adds both a human heart and a dramatic counterpoint to the film.
The problem with this is that biopics are constrained by real life, and real life doesn’t necessarily follow the dramatic rhythms that make for good fiction. The Aviator therefore struggles with the fact that the Hepburn / Hughes story is, chronologically, completely out of kilter with the Hughes-as-aviator story that structures the film. Hepburn therefore pretty much disappears about two thirds of the way through, meaning that the film moves down a notch at the point where, dramatically, it should be picking up steam. The women we see Hughes with in the second half of the film (Faith Domergue and Ava Gardner) are never fully developed, and drop in and out of the film almost at random. It’s a structural problem that the screenwriter, John Logan (who wrote Gladiator and Star Trek: Insurrection) can’t really overcome.
The film also struggles with the internal nature of Hughes’ mental problems. In a 1991 interview (in the book The Future of the Movies), Spielberg put his finger on what, for me, is the most interesting thing about Hughes as a film subject:
… he was, at one point in his life, for several decades, the most gregarious person, and then [for] the following several decades, the most infamously reclusive personality that’s ever been talked about in American twentieth-century history. I just find that very fascinating. What drove him to the seclusion? What drove him into the rooms with the curtains drawn?
The Aviator might justifiably have ducked this question by focussing on Hughes’ earlier years, but instead it tries to answer it and fails. Logan throws in a flashback to an over-protective mother, but that’s just lazy screenwriting: it doesn’t actually answer anything. It may be that no answer is possible, but to offer an insultingly simplistic answer is worse than not having offered one at all. If no better solution could be offered, Logan and Scorsese would have been better off referring to the mental troubles less overtly, allowing Hughes’ reclusiveness to be a foreboding shadow on the horizon, rather than a crude echo of his mother’s neuroses.
Despite these flaws, The Aviator remains engrossing due to the strength of its subject matter and the impeccable direction. Scorsese makes what he does look so easy that it is easy to take what he does for granted. Even as the screenplay gets waylaid or distracted, Scorsese’s storytelling skills keep the film moving confidently. Interestingly, given his long history of on-screen depictions of the mentally unhinged, he seems most assured with the scenes that show Hughes in full command of his faculties, such as the depictions of early Hollywood and the flying sequences. The special effects in the aerial scenes have a computer-generated sheen that lends them a slight unreality: whether intentional or not, this reinforces the magical air that Scorsese’s fluid camerawork lends these sequences. The spectacular early sequence during the filming of Hell’s Angels is all the explanation we need for Hughes’ obsession with flying. That, at least, is one thing that can be explained visually, and it is in such moments that The Aviator succeeds most comprehensively.