June 10, 2005

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Publication Date: Friday, June 10, 2005

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Director Martin Scorsese's wonderful "The Aviator" is all beautiful method with a deformed heart at its center, an epic of technique. It's a film that can be admired for its sleek lines and rumba editing by longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, who won the 2004 Academy Award for this film. But at its center there is always something missing, a type of "underwhelment" in its spirit. Scorsese has always been a director who constructs his films like daydreams of a film student who cannot find the perfect libretto to cram all the newfound maneuvers he or she has discovered. He emotes a lust for movies that clings to the viewer, but his characters seem to fall into the weightlessness of his fevered state so that we remember moments in his films but rarely the personal struggles that are faced. Here his subject is mogul Howard Hughes (played with eerie brilliance by Leonardo DiCaprio) whose struggles with madness seem more like an afterthought than a disease. In Hughes, Scorsese finds a kindred spirit, whose appetite for creativity and love for the broad canvases of aeronautics, filmmaking and buying and selling are portrayed as obsessions of an artistic mind, rather than a capitalistic libido. We first find Hughes in his 20s, making one of Scorsese's favorite films, "Hells Angels." The WWI drama proves to be a monumental endurance test for everyone involved (and the bane of his accountants) because of Hughes' willingness to risk his fortune on a film he crafts for over three years and films twice, due to the advent of sound. This is Scorsese's version of the heroic entrepreneur, the bright young man whose pluck never tarnishes even in madness. "The Aviator" then moves forward into entertaining biopic territory that fares better than most, due to screenwriter John Logan's fluid construction and Robert Richardson's elegant camerawork. We follow Howard Hughes mostly through his youthful highpoints: breaking in planes, fighting the studios, fighting the government and TWA, and into partial madness. Where Scorsese succeeds is in focusing on Hughes' relationship with Katherine Hepburn (which role won Cate Blanchett the 2004 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress). Hughes finds her a kindred spirit of lofty misfit-ism. They both are brash and brilliant, both know they do not belong, and Blanchett captures and filters Hepburn's nervous chatter and jocular energy with a smoldering intensity. One of my favorite passages in "The Aviator" chronicles a date between the two that turns into an impromptu flying lesson. Hughes holds the wheel and lets Hepburn take over. There is a type of taut sexual energy that is diffused through Django Reinhardt's contented strumming on the soundtrack and little needs to be said, it's all between the actors. It's Scorsese at his most real in the film; we almost wish the scene would never end. @tagline:Joe Ramirez

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