Review - Film - The Aviator

 

The Aviator

Wednesday night is date night at our house and last night we enjoyed a wonderful Chinese meal consisting of curry shrimp, mongolian beef, crab/cheese wontons, and fried dumplings served up at our new favorite Chinese restaurant, the Golden Shanghai in Aurora, Colorado. If you are in the area and would like to have a dining experience that’s a cut above the rest, check them out.

After dinner, as is our custom, we went out for a movie. We were both somewhat reluctant to see a movie, let alone a 3hr movie, in which we would be forced to endure Leonardo DiCaprio playing the lead role. However, having had such a nifty experience the week before with the critically acclaimed film, Million Dollar Baby, we decided to give it a shot.

The film opens with a scene from Hughes’s childhood which, judging from the reactions of those around us, made the audience uncomfortable. For me, I was annoyed that Mr. Scorsese would begin with such a provocative scene. This served to lead the audience down a path that detracted from the next scene. Better that this scene had occurred as a memory on the part of Hughes during the next scene. I was further put off by the fact that I couldn’t buy the characters in the next scene with their pencil line mustaches and glad handing as authentic. It felt like they were playing at a period rather than existing in a period.

In that scene, and in many of the others, Mr. Scorsese makes use of a technique involving the partial desaturation of colors in which greens are resolved to blues. I assume the effect was to infer a period, or perhaps patriotism(the colors were often red, white and blue) but it really only served to distract and annoy me.

The performance I enjoyed the most was that of Cate Blanchett in the role of Catherine Hepburn. She clearly did her homework on Ms. Hepburn. Her accent, elocution, and diction were spot on in almost every case. My only complaint, and it is a small one, is that there is a smoothness about Cate Blanchett that Katherine Hepburn never had that comes through occasionally. In fairness, I must confess that I don’t think anyone other than Ms Blanchett could have done better.

Other noteworthy performances were turned in by Alan Alda as Senator Owen Brewster, Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardener, Jude Law as Erol Flynn, Alec Baldwin as Juan Trippe the President of PAA, and John C. Reilly as Hughes’s business manager Noah Dietrich. They provided some of the most entertaining and moving moments of the film.

Did I mention that this film was 3hrs long? Yawn… Most of the rest of the film is carried by Mr. DiCaprio who delivers some of the best performances of his career along with some of the worst. This proved to be confusing for me as, often times, just as I was starting to buy Mr. DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, there would be a scene or a line that would jolt me out of my state of suspended disbelief and leave me scrambling to get back into the film. This leaves the overall impact of Mr. DiCaprio’s performance far below were it would have been if the offending scenes/lines been cut.

This film was easily an hour too long. It is as if Mr. Scorsese were sucked into the mindset of Howard Hughes – that of a rambling genius who had no regard for what others thought of what he was trying to achieve. There are parts of this film that are brilliant. They are interspersed between long periods of boring development and drawn out catharsis the sentiments of which, could have been communicated much more efficiently. These long dull periods give the film as a whole an uncomfortable feeling - Just when it was getting good…

RCS