The Aviator

After the Oscar ceremony in 2005, it seemed that Martin Scorsese was going to be one of those directors that is often nominated but never awarded. It can be frustrating to hear year after year that it is an honor just to get the nomination, churning out great movies like Taxi Driver and Goodfellas and yet always coming up cold on awards night. Spring of 2005 looked like it could beat this “curse” with the list of nominees for best picture having no definite front-runner. Million Dollar Baby won at the Golden Globes, but that wasn’t a surefire win at the Oscars. Many speculated that, even if Clint Eastwood’s movie was the more popular, Martin Scorsese would win because voters would see it as long overdue for him to be honored by the Academy. Alas, that honor would have to wait two more years. 

I saw The Aviator in theaters in early 2005, and I knew just a couple of things about it going in. It was about filmmaker Howard Hughes, and Cate Blanchett was playing Katharine Hepburn. I’m no aviation expert and knew nothing about Hughes’ interests in flying; I knew him as the director, only. I thought I was going into a biopic of a director breaking into Hollywood, making pictures that heavily incorporated planes. Instead, the film focuses more heavily on his life outside of pictures, especially his battle with Juan Trippe, Pan Am, and the U.S. Government over international commercial flying rights. It’s a credit to Scorsese and his cast of actors that this subject is as interesting as it is. When it’s all boiled down, what we have is a three-hour drama about a man obsessed with flying, women, and a debilitating mental illness that occasionally gets so bad he has to lock himself away from everyone and suffer in solitude. 

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Howard Hughes, an uber-wealthy aviation expert and filmmaker who is in the middle of filming his airborne war picture Hell’s Angels. The problem he is having is realism. Filming the planes in the air doesn’t convey the speed and scale of seeing the planes in person. His solution: make sure there are clouds behind the planes because having static objects in the background gives a sense of speed that doesn’t exist when the sky is clear. To get his shots, he grounds all of his planes for months waiting on clouds that stubbornly refuse to show up, costing his film company a fortune. This is exacerbated with the sudden success of The Jazz Singer, a talking picture. Hughes elects to reshoot and retool much of his film to make it into a talking film, too. The end results are phenomenal, but the budget overruns prove too much for the film to ever turn a profit. Hughes’s obsessiveness over perfection extends beyond the film’s premiere as he is even making editing changes after the release. 

He becomes romantically involved with actress Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), a brassy no-nonsense woman who helps him deal with his debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as well as his germaphobia. Their relationship is occasionally tense and abruptly ends when she tires of his workaholism and falls in love with married fellow actor Spencer Tracy, leaving Hughes. From there, he dates 15-year-old Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner), then Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale). But he never really gets over Katharine Hepburn and even spends a good bit of money keeping her and Spencer Tracy’s names out of the papers when their affair is on the verge of being exposed to the public. 

In 1935, Hughes broke the flight speed record, crashing the H-1 Racer in the process, then later setting the world record for circumnavigating the globe in four days. He subsequently bought controlling interest in Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA). This put him at odds with Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin), chairman of Pan Am. Juan gets his senator crony, Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), to introduce the Community Airline Bill (CAB), which would give Pan Am a monopoly on international air travel. Right around this time, Hughes suffers a setback on his OCD and germaphobia and lockes himself away from the world. He had recently crashed a test plane into a rural Beverly Hills neighborhood, nearly dying in the process, and has retreated into solitude, remaining naked and peeing into jars, communicating only through a locked door. Senator Brewster indites him on charges of defrauding taxpayers for planes commissioned for World War II that were never delivered, and Juan is counting on Hughes not appearing before the hearing board so that the charges will be confirmed, paving the way for the CAB to be passed, forcing Hughes to sell his TWA holdings to Pan Am. 

Biopics can often fall into the trappings of trying too hard to tell too broad of a story. We often see this in films about an artist or other famous person where the scope of the picture is from cradle to the grave. 1992’s Chaplin is such a film. In that one, we spend a great amount of time seeing Charlie Chaplin as a child, the hardships of being destitute, and follow him all the way through old age and end on his triumphal return to the Academy Awards for his lifetime achievement award. So much ground is covered that, unless you are a serious enthusiast of Chaplin, you will find too much emphasis on things that matter little. The best biopics are those that focus on a specific part of a person’s life and allow that part to tell its own story, unencumbered from unnecessary detail. The Aviator doesn’t waste our time with Hughes’ childhood nor does it challenge our endurance by making us sit through his later years and death. We don’t need long scenes attempting to explain why he was OCD nor why he was so enamored with flight. We get just enough in a very brief moment early on and can use our imagination to fill in the rest.

At this point in his career, Leonardo DiCaprio was still chasing Oscar recognition, too. Like Scorsese, there were some glaring omissions that many felt he deserved wins for. He failed to secure a nomination for Titanic and Gangs of New York, both films where he turned in good performances, and it seemed like he would be passed over forever. When the nominations were read out in 2005 and he was on that list, finally, people thought it was a make-up for years past. Then he didn’t get the win come Oscar night. He would have to wait another twelve years before finally getting a win. He and Scorsese have made many great films together, but DiCaprio’s only Oscar win would be for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s cold-weather western The Revenant. He was long overdue for that win. 

The Aviator deserved better at the Oscars that year. It would go on to pick up various production awards, but only Cate Blanchett got a performance award. Looking at her impersonation of Katharine Hepburn after the fact, it is obvious why she got it. This is not a comedic impression of the actress; if you are looking for that, there are plenty of sketch comedy shows that do exaggerated impressions of her. Cate has managed to nail the voice and mannerisms without making fun of them. She is funny in the role because Katharine was funny as herself. But when things get serious and sad, that same character shows through without compromising those emotions. This is not an easy feat when impersonating someone as iconic as Katharine was. She commands your attention whenever she is on screen, and it is a shame that she leaves the picture so soon. So much energy is lost when she is gone. 

A great deal of effort was made to accurately depict OCD. We can see it throughout as Hughes struggles against his impulses, washing his hands repeatedly with a special bar of soap he carries with him, then drying off his hands with every towel available to him at the sink. Only once is this played up for any laughs, when he finds himself trapped in the bathroom because he has used up all of the towels and now cannot get himself to grab the public bathroom doorknob and let himself out. His solution to the problem is one of the few laughs in this picture. 

Once this movie is past the Hollywood story side of things and gets into TWA and the battle with Pan Am, it loses some steam. Aviation enthusiasts might disagree and find a lot to latch onto during the test flights of the H-1 or the development of the Spruce Goose, but there is very little beyond that that can be enticing to watch. The film goes on for far too long and should have been trimmed by a good half-hour. As it is, it is never exactly tedious, but it does meander too much, making for a less than exciting viewing during the second half. 

A good movie has something for everyone, and that is one thing this film lacks. There is precious little in the second half that would interest the average person, making it a bit of a chore to get through. It also makes it not worth multiple viewings unless you are a fan of aviation. I saw the Spruce Goose in person in Portland and found that seeing the plane in the film didn’t come close to seeing it in person. With all the years of innovation since those days, it is hard to get excited over a large plane taking off unless you actually got to see the plane in reality and experienced just what a technological marvel it was for the time. Seeing it in the movie is a bit of a letdown, especially now since the effects don’t quite hold up anymore. The crash of the XF-11 reconnaissance aircraft is a far more exciting scene because of the way it is shot and just how destructive that crash was both to property and to Hughes himself. On top of everything else, we never get into Howard’s head and understand him as a person. In the three hours of film we are no more understanding of him as a person than we were at the start.

What we have in the end is a three-hour-long biopic that is a great showcase for acting and direction but has a story that is only really interesting to a narrow group of people: film buffs and aviation experts. It never becomes too boring to become a tedious chore to get through but isn’t exciting enough to merit repeat viewings. I saw it once in 2005, again today, and will probably go another twenty years before feeling a need to watch it again. The best movies I cannot imagine never being able to watch again. The Aviator is not one of those films. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Graham King and Michael Mann

Best Director: Martin Scorsese

Best Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio

Best Supporting Actor: Alan Alda

Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett (won)

Best Original Screenplay: John Logan

Best Art Direction: Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo (won)

Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson (won)

Best Costume Design: Sandy Powell (won)

Best Film Editing: Thelma Schoonmaker (won)

Best Sound Mixing: Tom Fleishman and Petur Hiddal

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Release Date: December 17, 2004

Running Time: 170 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, John C. Reilly, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda, and Jude Law

Directed By: Martin Scorsese