Pictured Barbara Stanwyck for the 'Bad Girls' program. #2 Tomboys and #3 When
Night Is Falling.
The Aviator is a perfect merging of director Martin Scorcese's love of excess and classic Hollywood. And no one in their heyday, Scorcese reminds us, was bigger than Howard Hughes and no canvas, it seems—not even the sky itself—was large enough to contain his grandiose vision. But within the large personality was also a mounting anxiety that would manifest itself in terrible ways. From many accounts, this could also be an apt description of Scorcese. True or not, this movie hails the return of a great filmmaker. After the missteps of Gangs of New York, Kundun, and the last half of Casino, that is terrific news. And I love the irony of a movie with thrilling aviation sequences made by a man with a very public fear of flying.
'You leave the big ideas to me,' Hughes tells his press agent and Scorcese seems to echo that sentiment throughout the film, which focuses on Hughes' early life as a movie producer, aviation enthusiast and daredevil and risk-taking industrialist. One breathtaking sequence follows another—and Scorcese presents them in black and white, sepia tone and blazing Technicolor—beginning with Hughes' exhortation to his weather consultant during the filming of Hell's Angels to, 'Find me some clouds.' When the consultant ( played by Ian Holm ) does—the resulting scene, a recreation of the dogfights from Angels is a visual stunner. The introduction of Cate Blanchett as Hughes' love interest Katharine Hepburn, leads to another. After recreating the anything-goes attitude of '30s nightclub legend the Coconut Grove, Scorcese fixes it so that his young lovers can ditch the noisy party revelers who are tossing man-made snowballs at each other and casually fly around Beverly Hills at night in Hughes' plane.
Shot against a thick, liquid moon and scored to 'Moonglow,' this may be the Scene of the Year and Hughes, whose phobias have already become clear to us, makes the ultimate romantic sacrifice when he gives Hepburn a swig off his milk bottle and then knowingly takes a drink after her. A bottle of milk never seemed so sexy. As Hepburn, Blanchett doesn't so much do an impersonation of the famous Kate ticks, as take them and create subtext for them. The scene in which she takes Hughes home to meet her ultra liberal, argumentative family is wonderfully fun and she does great work later in the movie when, for her own sanity, she makes a break with Hughes.
The picture continues with the young Hughes taking further and further risks—sometimes winning ( in one scene he ditches his plane in a field and emerges with impatience, ready to go up again ) , sometimes losing ( the terrible crash that almost kills him is vividly recreated ) but forever a subject of fascination to both friends and enemies. In the end we are left with a man who could not or would not heed the advice that Hepburn gives him early on, 'We're not like everyone else,' she tells him, knowing that too much of the fame drug can be fatal.
If there are problems—and here I'm going out on a wing—it's with the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role. True, his performance is assured and textured—and utterly terrifying when he develops the uncontrollable ( and at the time unnamed ) Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ( OCD ) that haunted Hughes and eventually destroyed him. But a great performance doesn't mean that he's right for the part. Kevin Kline proved this hands down earlier this year in De-Lovely when he brought his nice guy sensibility to the role of Cole Porter.
Not unlike Sissy Spacek in the latter half of Coal Miner's Daughter, DiCaprio as Hughes seems to be playing dress-up here—sort of a latter day Scott Baio from the '70s kiddie gangster musical Bugsy Malone. He seems not to have aged from the height of his teenage heartthrob Titanic days of seven years ago. The adolescent fixation at that time on 'Leo' isn't hard to understand in retrospect—his physicality is that of a teenager—and a prepubescent one at that. To me, he'll always be Gilbert Grape's brother, the mixed up juvenile delinquent in the marvelous Marvin's Room and yes, the cocky and talented Jack Dawson in Titanic. It would have been very interesting to see him switch roles with Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland, another terrific biopic with a boy-man at its center.
Scorcese is back on top with The Aviator but imagining a Taxi Driver aged DeNiro in the Hughes role is to catch a glimpse of what this picture could have been—Scorcese's masterpiece instead of a good movie with masterful scenes.
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The timing of the release of Kevin Spacey's Beyond the Sea couldn't be more unfortunate. Swamped in an ocean full of terrific biopics ( Ray, Finding Neverland, The Aviator ) , pretty good ones ( Kinsey, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers ) and even a bad one ( Alexander ) , his pet project, the life of mega lounge singer Bobby Darin, the one that he reportedly spent more than five years on, arrives in a field already too crowded. And though Spacey is crisscrossing the country on a concert tour in which he sings Darin's numbers ( as he does in the movie ) , not unlike his subject, it's a question of too little too late.
Though Spacey's movie is pleasant enough—one is left feeling a ) that Spacey, who is noticeably photographed with bags under his eyes throughout is, to be kind, a tad too old for the role of a song and dance man and, b ) that though his singing is technically fine it's not until the last ballad of the movie that it has any color or texture.
Unfortunately, there is nothing in either Spacey's singing or his performance to suggest the electricity and dynamism of the real-life Darin. Spacey's movie, coming at this stage of his career, does suggest the desperation that was also Darin, however—a man infatuated with the ring-a-ding-ding Rat Pack who arrived on the scene five years too late to make much of an impact. Progressively, Spacey's movie career seems to be suffering the same fate.
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Only a packed holiday cinema season has kept me from heading over to the Landmark Century to see Bad Education, the latest from masterful Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's and one of his most overtly gay movies yet. Described as a thriller, the movie features a gay romance, sexual abuse, and a drug-addicted transvestite—for starters. In other words, what sounds like another essential dose of Almodóvar. www.landmarktheatres.com .
