"The Aviator"

Martin Scorsese looks at the life of Howard Hughes through rose-colored -- and vibrant, stylish, Technicolor -- glasses.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Dec 17, 2004 | To anyone who first became aware of Howard Hughes in the 1970s -- who saw artists' renderings of him as a forlorn-looking mountain man with tired eyes and spiraling fingernails tough as ponies' hooves -- it seemed incomprehensible that he had ever made movies, flown planes and dated movie stars. But it was even harder to believe that he'd ever been young. To look at those sketches from the '70s, by which time Hughes was a paranoid crackpot recluse (a very rich paranoid crackpot recluse), was to see a nightmare straight out of a David Lynch movie, before there were David Lynch movies. When Hughes died in 1976, at age 70, he seemed like a cautionary figure to America's youth -- proof that rampant capitalism could make you crazy, or something like that. But it's possible that to people of his own generation Hughes stood for something else: maybe something as simple as glamour gone to seed -- or, simpler yet and far sadder, glamour grown old and crazy. You could envy Hughes his wealth. But no one who ever saw those pictures would want his face, or his soul.

That's not the Howard Hughes we see in Martin Scorsese's fine-boned, hugely entertaining and extravagantly empathetic "The Aviator." The story Scorsese tells begins in the mid-1920s, as Hughes is squirting his fortune away (with plenty to spare) on his ambitious first film, "Hell's Angels." It ends in 1947, as he testifies before the Senate War Investigating Committee, defending himself against charges of corruption regarding his wartime defense contracts. (The investigation was spearheaded by Maine Sen. Owen Brewster, a close friend of Hughes' chief business rival, Pan Am chief Juan Trippe; they're played by Alan Alda and Alec Baldwin, respectively.)

Within that time, Hughes had his first nervous breakdown (there would be others) and exhibited plenty of compulsive behavior -- for example, saving his urine in empty milk bottles, which he'd line up like a row of golden chorus girls. But while Scorsese gives us an inkling of Hughes' future madness, he turns his gaze away, politely, well before it takes a firm hold. Neither Scorsese nor screenwriter John Logan is particularly interested in picking at Hughes' bones: Dead bones make for an ugly movie. Instead, they translate Hughes' youthful vigor, his eccentricities and compulsions, and his status as a visionary, larger-than-life loner into discrete movie terms, a vivid language of obsessive close-ups and exhilarating flying sequences. Leonardo DiCaprio, actor and movie star, is in charge of making the moviefied Hughes feel human, and he succeeds. This is your standard biopic reinvented as a movie dream, a life broken up into bits of light (maybe the only way to render a life manageable) and sent streaming through a projector -- a digitized life with a celluloid heart.

Even though "The Aviator" is based on real-life people and events, very little about it seems real or realistic, and that's clearly by Scorsese's design: Among other things, "The Aviator" is a love letter to a time in Hollywood when matte painting and miniatures gave us a reality so heightened that we could scarcely believe our eyes. And yet believing them, even against our better judgment, is precisely the point of going to the movies, a point "The Aviator" milks deliciously. In a brief flashback, we see Hughes as a child, being bathed by his mother with some sort of heavy-duty black soap. She's worried he'll catch some deadly disease, and she's trying to protect him by keeping him scrupulously clean. The scene is shot in such warmly glowing light that it makes you feel nostalgic even for someone else's very weird childhood -- you don't have to be a hardcore Freudian to understand why Hughes, in later years, compulsively washed his hands with that same black soap, which he carried around with him in a little tin.

Next Page: A cockpit loaded with sexual politics

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