Back Rowe Reviews
Real Time Movie Reviews from the Back Row of a Theater

The Aviator (PG-13)

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Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio
December 2004

“A Modest Triumph in Retro-Cinema”


The Aviator is finely mounted, well crafted and star-studded, but it fails to attain its desired status as modern epic. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have reunited (Gangs of New York), presenting a soaring biopic of billionaire, industrialist and playboy, Howard Hughes. There’s no doubting the skill set of every person in every department that toiled on this film or the talent of the vast array of A-list actors that appear here, and yet, there’s still something lacking.

Perhaps it’s a matter of identification: how many of us have experienced the pressures of being a billionaire or struggled with the extreme mental aberrations Hughes dealt with on a daily basis? Perhaps it’s the preponderance of narrative or the scarcity of action sequences? Perhaps its film’s length—
The Aviator weighs in at three hours and five minutes—or some other, intangible, factor.

Whatever the reason, the movie succeeds as a work of art, but fails to entertain in any significant way: when Hughes repeats “The wave of the future” like a skipping CD right before the final fade, have we really been impacted on an emotional level or do we just pity the man in the mirror?

DiCaprio does a superb job of bringing Hughes’ passions, foibles and eccentricities to life and Cate Blanchett turns in a marvelous performance as Katherine Hepburn: their best scenes together are the golf game, Hughes teaching Hepburn how to fly, the meet the parents debacle and their fulminating breakup. Two foils for Hughes in the movie (other than his O.C.D. and fits of hypochondria) are Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin), owner of rival Pan Am Airlines and Senator Brewster (Alan Alda in an Oscar-worthy performance), a crooked politician bent on destroying Hughes in a sure-fire trial that turns into a media circus.

The rest of the cast reads like a SAG roll call: Jude Law (as Errol Flynn), Kate Beckinsale (as Eva Gardner), Gwen Stefani (as Jean Harlow), John C. Reilly, Edward Herrmann, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Brent Spiner, the list goes on and on.

I have to admit that
The Aviator is a lavish spectacle featuring a powerfully moving, human story, but its sheer size and power left me a little overwhelmed—it’s so overstuffed and top heavy that it collapses under its own weight. All the movie’s bells and whistles seem to cry, “Look at me. Look at what an exceptional film this is.” Some may buy into the movie’s sizzle, but the meat I crave is of a different ilk. In the end, The Aviator has Hughes-sized ambitions that render the film a high-powered oddity.

Rating: 2 1/2