To Air Is Human (2004)

Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale PG-13, 169 mins., (Miramax)

Howard Hughes made lavishly expensive movies, slept with countless Hollywood stars (and thousands of women beyond that), and, most obsessively, did more than perhaps any other single figure to envision and create the technology of air flight as we know it. He dreamed big, and lived big too—bigger than anyone around him—and as you watch Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, there's a sleek, almost tactile pleasure to be had in getting swept up in the gale force of a man who smashed through limits because he didn't see them. Scorsese spins his camera through '30s deco nightclubs, and he sends it soaring into the air right along with Hughes, who was like an insatiable reckless kid when it came to testing out the planes that he'd designed. Simply put, Howard Hughes was someone who didn't want to come down. The Aviator's camera work, it should be said, is a lot more commanding than its psychology, yet even when what you're watching doesn't add up, the movie, like Hughes, cruises along on a vibe of propulsive ambition. You can feel the kick Scorsese got out of making it, and the kick is infectious.

The Aviator doesn't waste any time setting up the grandiosity of Hughes' drive. After a dreamy bathtub prologue, in which the young Howard's mother tests him out on the spelling of quarantine (the film's OCD equivalent of Rosebud), the movie plunges us right into the shooting of Hell's Angels, the World War I aviation epic that Hughes directed in the California desert and bankrolled, to the then-insane tune of $3.8 million, with his family's oil fortune. It's 1927, and Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is all of 21, is a speeding human bullet who's come blasting out of Texas. The movie he's trying to make is an advertisement for the fearless seduction of flight; spectacular excess is its lure. Hughes wants to control everything—actors, planes, the weather—and even 24 cameras aren't enough for him. When he goes up into the air with a small army of bombers for a dogfight sequence, the rickety biplanes zoom in every direction, flying within inches of each other, but Hughes stands right up in his cockpit so he can grab a better shot.

DiCaprio, at first, looks and sounds disquietingly boyish, like a 16-year-old in a high school production of Guys and Dolls. Yet he's a dynamo of an actor. Tall and boundlessly confident, with a tar slick of hair and eyebrows that scrunch down in playful cunning, he makes this handsome whippersnapper's youthful energy an expression of pure, irrepressible ambition. To court Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), Hughes pilots a futuristic water plane right onto the set of Sylvia Scarlett, and the moment he has whisked her away, the clickety-click attraction of their personalities is palpable. Blanchett doesn't just do a great impersonation of those glorious Hepburn vowels, which make her sound like a yawning kitty cat; she nails the stubborn decency that drives that severe singsong. The movie cuts from Hughes stroking her bare back to his inspection of a silver plane in which the rivets are jutting out too far, and when he orders his engineers to render the surface more aerodynamically smooth, we get what he's after: flight as heady as sex.

As you watch The Aviator, the vision, the crazy daring, the go-go thrust of Hughes' personality spills right into the scope and exuberance of the movie itself—and into our desire to see Scorsese pull another major achievement out of his hat. I'm afraid, though, that he doesn't quite do it. The movie is studded with marvelous moments, like a jaw-dropping plane crash in which Hughes slices through entire blocks of Beverly Hills, yet it has a deeply flawed trajectory. Hughes spends far too much of the film's second half battling the corrupt Senator Brewster (Alan Alda) for the right of TWA, the airline Hughes owns, to fly the world skies along with Pan Am. His antimonopoly stance is unassailable, yet the fight comes off as a generic anticorporate crusade. It doesn't work as a consummation of Hughes' majestic vision.

More crucially, The Aviator fails to present Howard Hughes as an entirely coherent human being. Scorsese and his screen-writer, John Logan, don't shy away from the destructive insatiability of Hughes' womanizing, or from his contamination fears, which escalate into full-blown mania. Yet his dark side is at once there and not there: The undertow of lust never quite surfaces in DiCaprio's performance, and Hughes' germ phobia, as well as his obsessive-compulsive repetition of certain phrases, is treated as a prominent yet strangely arbitrary, almost meaningless aspect of his inner life. Faced with a congressional hearing, he steps out of his madness as if it were a pair of old trousers. Scorsese, I think, is so invested in making The Aviator upbeat and rousing that the movie never quite reveals, the way that Kinsey or Ray or A Beautiful Mind or even a good E! True Hollywood Story do, how its hero's vision and his grand torments could be flip sides of the same temperament. The Aviator mostly pays lip service to Hughes' demons, though it does make charged American-movie poetry out of his dreams. B

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