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Howard Hughes
(1905-1976) was an eccentric playboy from Texas
who inherited about $1 billion from his oil and
tool tycoon father’s estate in 1924, back when a
billion dollars was still a lot of money.
Hughes, a ne’er-do-well college dropout,
squandered the profits from his father’s
corporations during ill-advised forays into the
movie and aviation industries. Running almost
every new venture into the ground, his name
generally came to be associated with spectacular
failures, for again and again his businesses had
to be bailed out by money from one of his
long-established family companies.
The gangly,
six-foot-four-inch gazillionaire was
considerably more lucky in love, since, as the
owner of RKO Pictures, he had the power to make
or break a budding career. This enabled him to
lead a glamorous lifestyle, and to have his name
splashed across the tabloids for dating a
succession of aspiring starlets, including Jean
Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Ginger
Rogers and Lana Turner. A big proponent of the
casting couch, he proudly wore his well-earned
nickname as “The World’s Greatest Womanizer.”
As for his
equally celebrated dark side, he began
exhibiting signs of the mental illness that
would be his ruin as early as 1944, when he had
his first mental breakdown. By the mid-1950s
Hughes had turned into a paranoid hermit with a
deathly fear of germs, and at the time of his
death he hadn’t been photographed or seen in
public for more than 20 years.
Leave it to
Martin Scorcese to figure a way to put a
positive spin on the biography of such
certifiable loser. For “The Aviator” is a flick
whose script is made up mostly of revisionist
history, presenting a spoiled-rotten rich kid as
some sort of unappreciated visionary. It’s like
someone making a movie 100 years from now
praising Paris Hilton as a revered icon who had
somehow made significant contributions to
society, rather than as a shallow celebutante
famous only for being famous.
Here, Scorcese
cleans up the cad’s act, never mentioning any of
Hughes’ three marriages, or the fact that one ex
even sued him for bigamy. The film also
conveniently ignores all the evidence that
Hughes was a shy, inarticulate weirdo who women
would have run the other way from, if he hadn’t
been loaded. No, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio,
he’s been transformed into a debonair charmer
and certified genius responsible for almost
every modern innovation in cinema and
aeronautics.
Clocking in at a
tedious two hours and 46 minutes, the movie
unfolds far too slowly, expecting faithfully
recreated sets and period costumes to substitute
for credible dialogue and a sensible storyline.
But for all the atmosphere, the soulless bio-pic
fails to spark any excitement, probably because
so much of it is a superficial fabrication
celebrating the stereotypical decadence of the
rich and famous.
Further, it’s
funny that Scorsese didn’t understand that Cate
Blanchett not resembling Kate Hepburn would be a
problem, a big problem. His decision to cast her
in a pivotal role as the prototypical classic
WASP beauty doomed the production from the very
start. Blanchett’s rendition of Hepburn is
unintentionally funny and prevents the audience
from appreciating any of her scenes as anything
but a sidesplitting aside.
Except for the
terminally-nasal Alan Alda, the rest of the
actors are not so distracting. There’s Kate
Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, Jude Law as Errol
Flynn, Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow, Jane Lynch
as Amelia Earhart, Kevin O’Rourke as Spencer
Tracy, Michael-John Wolfe as Cary Grant and
Stanley DeSantis as Louis B. Mayer.
At least Hughes’
lonely descent into insanity, which came during
years of barricading himself from the rest of
humanity, is accurately depicted. But since
Scorsese had given the rest of his life a
Hollywood makeover, why not have his hero fly
off into the sunset with the bottle blonde of
the moment, instead of mumbling to himself naked
in a hermetically sealed room? The upshot of
this dismal debacle is that the oft-nominated
director will have to wait at least one more
year for the elusive Oscar he could’ve won for
“Taxi Driver,” “Goodfellas,” “Raging Bull” or a
number of much more deserving flicks. |
