Soaring: “The Aviator” (2004)

By Scott Ross

At first glance, Leonard Di Caprio seemed an odd choice to portray Howard Hughes, just as Cate Blanchett was far from what one expected of Katharine Hepburn. This had nothing to do with their respective talents; Di Caprio gave one of the most astonishing performances ever captured on film as Johnny Depp’s retarded younger brother Arnie in the 1993 What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and has built on that promise steadily through the years, while Blanchett’s gifts are obvious to anyone who experiences her work. But she has nothing like the classic beauty of the young Hepburn, and Di Caprio, with his round, boyish face, Cagneyesque features and pleasant tenor, was much less imaginable as Hughes than, say, Warren Beatty, who planned a picture about this American eccentric for decades. Or was, anyway; The Beatty of the Reds era could have pulled it off; the Beatty of today would be believable more as the older, demented Hughes than as the dashing aviation pioneer and renegade movie mogul with his movie-idol looks and youthful panache.*

Two minutes into Di Caprio’s performance in The Aviator, however, and all doubts are dismissed. Even the face seems to alter over the movie’s running time; by the end, he is Hughes, mustache, cracked baritone voice and all. (Blanchette by contrast never quite overcomes her somewhat lumpy, un-formed features, although her performance is superb.)

The selling points, for me, then, were not the stars but the movie’s director and screenwriter. The playwright John Logan has a history both of taking on well-known historical subjects (Leopold and Loeb and Mark Rothko before The Aviator, Alice Liddell and Sue Mengers since) and for splendid dialogue, characterization and approach. Scorsese, once a personal favorite, had more than sufficient cause in those days despite his varying box-office to be considered the finest American filmmaker of his generation.† It seemed like a dream combo.

So it was. In an epoch in which success in Hollywood is defined more by mass popularity with sub-literate audiences overseas than with the craft of making smart, engaging movies about recognizably human beings, Scorsese and Logan created that rarest of rarities, an intelligent epic — to my mind the most artistically successful, and satisfying such since Reds.

The look of The Aviator is remarkable; in the first third of the movie, Scorsese emulated the look of two-strip Technicolor (three-strip in the following third) giving the images a vibrancy and color that make a serious movie surprisingly light, airy and beautiful to watch. The arc of the narrative takes in Hughes’ obsessive, and seemingly capricious, follies (The Outlaw, the H-4 Hercules, sneeringly referred to as “the Spruce Goose”) and his increasing, if slowly arrived at, mental and emotional instability. The scenarist at first merely hints at the now-fabled “crazy old rich man” to come, then, in a long and agonizing sequence following Hughes’ near-fatal crash, makes it clear that whatever lucidity Hughes re-establishes is momentary only. Di Caprio heart-breakingly suggests the disorientation of those early brushes with dementia, his eyes expressing mounting panic and confusion at what his mouth is saying (“The way of the future… the way of the future…”) and it’s at once chilling and deeply moving.

After several decades of unfettered violence and gore at the movies, I am seldom shocked by what I see on an American screen. Disgusted, certainly, and often repulsed and upset at the assault on my senses. But genuine shock at the movies is rare, and in The Aviator, Scorsese and Logan pull it off not once, but twice. I can vividly remember my gasp, near the beginning, when, as Di Caprio’s Howard is shooting aerial footage for Hell’s Angels, another biplane’s propellers smack into his hand-held camera and carry it away; Hughes merely reaches for another. It’s a moment of genuine terror immediately alleviated by logical (and relieved) audience laughter. The second moment of shock comes at mid-point, during the crash of Hughes’ experimental FX-11: The stunning shot of that huge wing bisecting the upper story wall of a Beverly Hills mansion. It was so unexpected (or was, to this viewer, who knew little about Hughes’ history as a pilot) I heard myself gasp a second time. In neither sequence was the shock I felt so viscerally related to violence in the usual sense of that word, but to the sudden up-ending of the immediate surroundings, and its effect on a human being.

If I’ve any disappointment with The Aviator, it’s at the movie’s refusal to examine Hughes’ alleged bisexuality. For all I know Logan, who is gay, may have included that element of Howard’s persona in his original script. But a major, expensive ($110 million) Hollywood movie, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo Di Caprio, was hardly going in that direction. One can imagine the usual Bonnie and Clyde excuses being given and arguments offered (“We’re telling a story about a man so obsessive and weird, we can’t risk alienating the audience with that too!”)‡

That such fear of the mythical audience, even in 2004, still trumped complete honesty, in this single area at least, is itself something of a shock.

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*Beatty finally played Hughes, albeit the Howard of 1958, in the remarkable Rules Don’t Apply (2016), which he wrote and directed.

†I’ve revised my opinions on Scorsese in the years since the above was written. It takes nothing from his considerable achievements on Mean Streets, Taxi Driver or GoodFellas (or, indeed, The Aviator) to observe that he is, increasingly, a man more taken with the camera than with compelling story or character. He’s become almost a parody of his earlier self, annoying where he used to be exhilarating.

‡Considering the box-office failure of Oliver Stone’s later, magnificent Alexander, ascribed to audience revulsion at “Alexander the Gay” (as the movie was derisively called) depicted therein, the suits may have had a point. An ugly one, but a point.

Text copyright 2014 by Scott Ross