The Aviator
Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale
Martin Scorsese plummets from his dizzying peak with Gangs of New York, with The Aviator, an abortive potboiler auto-romantic biography of airplane magnate Howard Hughes. It’s not normally my style to begin a review with a barb so levelled, but to see the film is to experience something akin to nausea confined solely to the mind — unpleasant at moments, but with a singular, purposeful rush, and at least there’s nothing to clean up.
Characterization ranges from dead-on (Gwen Stefani is a striking Jean Harlow, accurate down to the Betty Boop-meets-Annie Lennox coo) to sheer caricature (Alec Baldwin’s proposterous, blustering head of Pan Am). DiCaprio is, well, DiCaprio, although here appearing with a mint julep-steeped Southern Boy accent. It’s enough to seduce the ear, but it’s not why we came to the theatre.
It would appear — from the opening shot of the picture, no less! — that our unlikely hero was molested by his single mother. The audience is walked on from this point with the sledgehammer pseudo-assumption that all of Hughes’ mental illness — and genius — arose from that single moment in time.
In this way, the viewer is conditioned to see Hughes as a swordless samurai warrior, wearing his armor on the inside, unable to comprehend his role in the monoramaic Rashomon that is his life. In other words, the postman always rings twice, but Hughes hears three chimes.
An effective storytelling viewpoint, and points to Scorsese, but it makes for a heavy-handed biopic. What should have been a hard look at an uncompromising magician of the mid-century skies becomes emotional pornography.
And all the bottled urine in the world won’t fix that.