Soaring to new, digital, heights for Scorsese

The Aviator (2004)
Miramax presents a Martin Scorsese film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett. Written by John Logan. 170m. PG-13 for thematic elements, sexual content, nudity, language and a crash sequence.

4 stars

Martin Scorsese, 62, has often been considered an old school master living in a more modern age. So imagine my surprise when, at the near end of his latest 170 minute effort, he digitally inserts a shot that begins outside the giant Hercules aircraft and ends up in an extreme close-up of the fierce resolve present in Howard Hughes’s eyes.

While a push through an digitized aircraft’s window isn’t uncommon in a big-budget action film, it is a rarity for Scorsese, who has often been lauded for his films’ realistic, and exquisite, cinematography.

But like his subject, the billionaire Texan Howard Hughes, Scorsese needed to think outside ordinary limitations to get a film like “The Aviator” off the ground. The glaring summation of Hughes life is akin to the fictional Charles Foster Kane: he lived a life of excess that became an obsession.

The biopic opens on the teen-age Hughes, who has just wrangled control of his deceased father’s drill bit company and has siphoned the positive cash flow into his extravagant war flick, “Hell’s Angels.” A thematic resonance is established. As the fictional David St. Hubbins would say, “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”

During the midst of the Great Depression, the self-confident twenty-something scraps the entire film to accommodate the latest technology: the talkie. But instead of outrage over his $3.8 million expenditure, people embrace Hughes as a young whippersnapper bucking the studio-laden system.

And we believe it because actor Leonardo DiCaprio is selling it so well. DiCaprio is no stranger to the role of part-huckster; his turn in “Catch Me If You Can” is evidence of that. But this project, which DiCaprio fostered for years, may very well be what he stakes his personal reputation on in the future. And the performance he gives, which transitions Hughes from the mid-1920s to the late 40s, is nothing short of totally engrossing.

Screenwriter John Logan synthesizes Hughes’ many public dalliances into two main flings: those with actresses Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale). In the blue-blooded Connecticut Yankee Hepburn, Hughes finds solace in her eccentricities. He’s grounded by her acceptances of his obsessive-compulsive tendencies, which have just begun to show outwardly by the mid-1930s. And as daunting as it would be to play a screen legend, Blanchett has Hepburn’s peccadilloes mastered to perfection, right down to her affectation while speaking. Blanchett, in an interview, said icons like Hepburn are remembered for the way they spoke as much as their looks. Yet she doesn’t resort to parody or high camp for her performance, something that a less capable actor might have tried.

By the end of the 1930s, Hughes had controlling interest in Trans World Airlines. His passion for aviation had consumed his life, even more so than the boundary-pushing movies he was notorious for overseeing. In Pan-Am head Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) lay a natural adversary, someone as interested in aviation’s contributions to capitalism as Hughes was. Their good natured relationship in public was little indicator of the muckraking behind the scenes, such as Trippe’s unofficial hiring of Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) to investigate Hughes publicly.

By the senate investigations, Hughes had begun his downward spiral into the pit of obsessive compulsive disorder. He had crashed an experimental reconnaissance plane into a Beverly Hills neighborhood and his Hercules project was being ridiculed as “The Spruce Goose,” an obnoxious waste of taxpayer money. Through Brewster, Alda nicely captures the seeds of corruption inherent in the senator’s motivations.

By the end of the film, with Hughes outwardly exhibiting signs of deep-seated paranoia and obsessive tendencies, it’s hard to imagine this film not being viewed as a sad tragedy. But perhaps some will see Hughes as someone who paid the price for being too ambitious, too greedy or too capitalistic. Maybe, as they are prone to say in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” this disease is where Howard Hughes gets his comeuppance.

The answer may lie in Hughes’ eyes. Cinematographer Robert Richardson said Scorsese instructed him to keep in mind the eyes during lighting and framing scenes, because in the eyes lie the truest emotion. In DiCaprio’s eyes, we see Hughes’ mind working faster than the available technology and a great fear of the unknown disease. I think audiences will sympathize with Hughes; although he is part showman, a more genuine quality is revealed in personal moments with Hepburn. During those times, Hughes discloses his fear about not being in control for the first time in life. For a person who bought his way out of every problem, obsessive-compulsive disorder offered no such bargain.

One final note: “Aviator” producers were quite proud of Scorsese’s decision to create three distinct color themes for the film. They explain: “From the 1920s through 1938 the look is muted, with a green-hued, historical quality; from 1938 through the 1940s, the ambiance takes on the trademark ‘classic Hollywood’ lushness of full Technicolor; and then by the end of the film, the color subtly shifts to the modern color film look familiar to filmgoers in 2004.” I must confess that I missed it almost entirely, otherwise engaged in the storytelling to notice the changing aesthetics.