"The Aviator"

I would have thought DiCaprio too wispy to play Howard Hughes, but the performance works. He's more beautiful than Hughes ever was: In some scenes his eyes look inhumanly blue -- it's the blue of a Siamese cat's eyes, or maybe those of a scheming, preening Persian. But the smooth, cool surface DiCaprio shows us has a suitable number of cracks in it. Hughes suffers through the premiere of "Hell's Angels" -- he doesn't like crowds, and as almost any director would, he fears the audience will hate the picture. His anxiety channels itself to a relatively small piece of real estate: His brow furrows into a maze of wrinkles, like a complicated Celtic symbol. And in a much later scene, after Hughes has suffered a freakout and has locked himself in the screening room that's part of his offices, he tentatively allows Hepburn, who broke up with him long ago, to tempt him back to the real world. He needs it. Hepburn has come to thank him for a kindness he paid her (he bribed a newsman to hand over pictures of her and the married Spencer Tracy, to save her from scandal). He hasn't emerged for weeks (this is where those empty milk bottles come in handy), his hair is a scruffy, mangled mess, and his fingernails have passed the shovel stage.

He won't open the door for her, but he talks to her from the other side.

"Can you hear me?" she asks the partly deaf Hughes.

"I can always hear you, Katy," he says, "Even in the cockpit, with the engines running."

DiCaprio plays the scene with muted, confused tenderness. He brings a similar quality to a later scene where the peppery Ava Gardner shows up at his house where, once again, he has barricaded himself, and cleans him up so he'll be ready to go to Washington to testify before the Senate. In a reedy, playful voice, he asks Gardner if she'll marry him. "You're too crazy for me," she purrs, the understatement of the year, but one tinged with regret as well as frustration.

"The Aviator" glides a bit too smoothly over Hughes' paranoia and cruelty. (You wouldn't believe that this character and the one played so unnervingly by Robert Ryan, in Max Ophül's marvelously tense "Caught," were both based on the same man.) And Hughes' relationship with Hepburn is treated as the centerpiece of his romantic life, when in reality it may have been more casual. But you end up believing in the movie's vision anyway, if only because Hughes needs to have at least one person who truly understands him. He surrounds himself with supporters, like bespectacled meteorologist professor Fitz (Ian Holm), and longtime advisor and associate Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly). But it's Hepburn who best understands that while celebrity and wealth alone would be enough to set herself and Hughes apart from mere mortals, their shared and individual oddness ensures that they'll never really fit in anywhere. She imparts a tender warning: "We're not like everyone else -- too many acute angles, eccentricities."

You could say that Hughes was eventually done in by those acute angles, that they choked off his sanity and barricaded him from the truly living. That's the part of Hughes' story Scorsese only alludes to -- it's a murky shadow around the corner of the movie's ridiculously rousing, and satisfying, Hollywood ending. If nothing else, "The Aviator" is proof of the restorative powers of Hollywood, of its ability to work miracles on certain lost causes. Hollywood can't raise a man from the dead, but it can, for the space of an hour or two, give him back his youth. For certain lost souls, that temporary flash of life may be happier than the one that was actually lived.

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