SYNOPSIS

"The Aviator" tells the story of aviation pioneer Howard Hughes (DiCaprio), the eccentric billionaire industrialist and Hollywood film mogul famous for romancing some of the world's most beautiful women. The drama recounts the years of his life from the late 1920s through the 1940s, an epoch when Hughes was directing movies and test flying innovative aircraft he designed and created. It also chronicles Hughes' struggle with his physical disabilities and phobias, and his increasingly erratic, obsessive-compulsive behavior that led him ultimately to isolate himself from his associates and withdraw from the world.

Review by DARREL MANSON

Martin Scorsese has a gift for making the characters in his films very real. They may or may not be good people deep inside, but we do get that chance to see deep into their souls. Among the best examples of this are Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Alice Hyatt in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and all the gangsters that populate films like Means Streets, Goodfellas, or Casino. In The Aviator he shows us the self-contained contradiction that was central to Howard Hughes.

Many people only remember Hughes as the wealthy recluse rumored to have foot-long fingernails, said to be living in penthouses in Las Vegas, the Bahamas, London, Mexico. He is remembered for his eccentricity more than for any of his accomplishments.

Hughes was a business wunderkind of the mid-Twentieth Century. He dropped out of college to become CEO of Hughes Tool, which his father had built. He was, on the one hand, a capable, successful businessman. On the other hand, he took huge risks, even mortgaging all his assets for a pet project. He was a filmmaker, an aircraft designer, a record setting airplane pilot. He eventually owned Hughes Aircraft, RKO studios, and TWA. He escorted some of the most renowned actresses of his time, including Katherine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. He was, by nearly every way of judging, a success. But even with all the success (often succeeding in spite of himself), he lived a life dominated by fear.

The juxtaposition of the drive to succeed and the deep fear that controlled his life is the heart of The Aviator.

The Aviator focuses on Hughes life from the 1920s to the 1950s. It begins while he is making the most expensive (at the time) movie ever made, Hell’s Angels, for which he had assembled the largest private air force in the world. He was compulsive about every aspect of the film. Expense was no concern to Hughes, although his stockholders in Hughes Tool were concerned.

That sense of compulsion underlies the contradiction that is so evident in this portrait of Hughes. As time passes in the film, we note the growing sense of compulsion, not just in his perfectionism in films and aircraft, but also in his private life. We see the development and advancement of his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. To all the world, Hughes was in control of everything around him. But we see that on a more personal level, he was totally out of control.

Leonardo DiCaprio gives one of his best performances in recent years. It is not just in the way he has captured Hughes’s look, but the way he is at once both full of bravura and highly vulnerable.

Scorsese has made the film both a personal story and a sweeping epic (a combination that he fell just short of in Gangs of New York.) It may not be his best film, but it is certainly one of the better works of one of the grand masters of filmmaking.

Hughes was able to soar to great heights (literally and figuratively). The physics that allow for flight are counterbalancing forces: thrust and drag, lift and gravity. The Aviator shows how counterbalancing forces were present in Hughes life (as they are in all lives.) Scorsese chose to limit the film to the time period when those forces were still somewhat in sync. Eventually the forces that drug him down overwhelmed his life, but The Aviator leaves us with the sense that the forces that drive us on can overcome great forces against us.

In our own lives we know that there are forces that are capable of destroying us. It is through availing ourselves of the counter forces which God provides, we too may be able to soar.