Plane and simple
THE AVIATOR
Directed by Martin Scorcese
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale
170 mins, 12A
3/5
If you like planes and dislike women, The Aviator may be the film for you. And if you think you would like to see Leonardo DiCaprio playing Howard Hughes for most of three hours, you should certainly go down to the hanger.
Sit in the pilot's seat, put on your goggles and take off into a world devoted to Hughes admiring planes, spending three years making a film showing scores of planes; designing planes - "We will do without an upper wing"..."I want those rivets shaven" - developing and manufacturing planes; test-flying planes; buying and running companies that own and operate planes (TWA); competing with other plane operators (Pan Am); and bribing the military to buy planes. This film is not called The Aviator for nothing.
Howard Hughes was born with his father's tool company in his mouth, and its profits fuelled his profligate expenditure on planes, films, and film stars. He is shown as a tough reckless visionary, dominating his employees, taking all the decisions. And the decisions he took were always the same: make it perfect, and spend what it takes (usually too much).
Apart from planes, he had three major sidelines - films, women, and an obsession with hygiene, which developed into paranoia. Looking first at the obsession, this apparently derived from his mother spelling out to him in childhood the need for quarantine in the disease-infested South. (The quarantine motif is used like the Rosebud in Citizen Kane.)
Women are dealt with in a strange way. In life, Hughes was promiscuous. He boasted of his success with 200 Hollywood virgins - possibly mistakenly on two counts - as well as with a galaxy of stars. The film shows us Hughes sitting next to a cheap-looking Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani), having a long affair with Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), and being rejected by a rough-speaking Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), who insists on remaining just a dinner companion (!) And he picks up a cigarette-girl. Apart from them, not a virgin in sight.
The extraordinary thing is the way the film portrays Katherine Hepburn - as raucous, egocentric, tough, and distressingly horrid. Katherine Hepburn won four Oscars in a long cinema career. She died only last year, aged 93; and now the knives are out. She has even been targeted by the evangelical Right. True she was an independent spirit, as she said herself, she could be irritating. But this film's portrayal of her character may well go too far.
Jude Law plays Errol Flynn, and Ian Holm a joke Professor Fitz.
Scorcese can make a film seem majestic, important, even if it is not. And he can carry on as if a failure is a success. For example, Hughes is shown as being dissatisfied with his shots of bi-planes wheeling in the sky. They seem to move too slowly because of a lack of a cloud background. A scientist is hired, and everyone sits around - including us - it seems for ever, until some clouds arrive. With an air of triumph we are shown the new footage, consisting of no more than a few tacky aerial sequences.
Another example. Hughes gives Ava a magnificent Kashmiri sapphire to match her eyes. The only trouble is, we see the sapphire on the right of the screen, and her eyes on the left. They do not match.
What did I like about the film? Alan Alda creates an exquisite cameo of the corrupt Senator Owen Brewster, and the hearing before his committee is both dramatic and funny.
Kate Beckinsale looks exceptionally beautiful and is exceptionally well turned-out. Parts of her appearances are the only fleeting moments of grace in the entire film.
And one of the planes was stunning - probably because of its shaven rivets.
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