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March 08, 2005

The Aviator

I finally got around to The Aviator today, as my spring break movie binge continues. I'd been avoiding it because it had all the signs of Oscar bait: whitewashed biopic, hero with a psychological disability, movie about movies, bloated running time. It is all those things, but I'd forgotten how much fun watching a Scorcese movie always is, no matter what the putative storyline. Nobody moves the camera like Scorcese, and every scene flows into the next with effortless grace. The first 2/3 of the movie is a real treat, as Marty avoids worrying too much about the character arc and just lets us enjoy one spectacular scene after another: Hughes filming dozens of planes from the cockpit of another in Hells Angels; Hughes and Jean Harlow at glamorous premieres; Hughes and Kate Hepburn flying over LA.

Sadly, since this is still Oscar bait, we eventually have to get around to the triumph of the human spirit, and so what sounds like a pedestrian business squabble between Hughes's TWA and Pan Am gets turned into a climactic Senate hearings showdown between Howard and a corrupt senator manipulated by Pan Am, played with real glee by Alan Alda. The movie asks us to see Hughes as the fiesty underdog taking on Alec Baldwin's evil Pan Am monopolist, but it really just looks like a pissing match between two moguls, one of whom we happen to feel a little sorry for because we've been watching his life story for two hours and we know he's on the verge of succumbing to his demons. The film implies that if Hughes hadn't taken on Pan Am, the latter would have sat on its monopoly on international air flight, and the skies might never have been opened to transcontinental jet flight. But I didn't get any sense that if the situation had been reversed, Hughes would have been any less brutal in trying to quash his own competition. And while monopolies are certainly bad things (see Microsoft), deregulation can be even worse (see the present state of the airline industry).

You'd think the climactic political battle would have a bit of contemporary resonance - not only because of the Microsoft parallels and the state of airlines today, but also because the corporate purchase of political influence hasn't exactly died down in the 58 years since the film is set. But the movie's so desperate to bring us to a rousing close that there's no room for those kinds of parallels to emerge. Instead, Hughes turns the tables, grills the senator, then storms off, to the very unlikely applause of the assembled audience. The History Channel is running a "History vs. Hollywood" episode on Hughes that I'll have to check out - I'd be very surprised if the actual hearings so closely followed the plot of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

The representation of Hughes's OCD is basically well-handled, but not revelatory - he washes his hands a lot, starts involuntarily repeating words, and ends up collecting his urine in milk jars. The roots are laid at the hands of childhood trauma (a cholera epidemic in Houston as he was growing up) and a semi-eroticized fixation on the memory of his mother bathing him. The film pounds this message home with too many script callbacks and a final visual flashback to the opening bathing scene. This pat Freudianism is unlikely to overcome the contemporary audience's historical condescension; watching the movie, you can't help but think, "if only he had Prozac . . ."

The most interesting part of Hughes as a character is the confluence of his risk-taking and neurosis - compartmentalizing all his anxiety in his hygeine seemed to be part of what allowed him to risk his money and his life on a series of crazy schemes, from the most expensive movie ever made (Hell's Angels) to a series of radical airplance designs.

This drama, in the end, is clearly Scorcese's real connection with the material. Like Apocalypse Now and so many other overblown auteur labors of love, this is a drama about the creator-as-megalomaniac-as-genius. The funny thing is, Scorcese himself breaks so few rules in making it. (The whole film runs like a watered-down version of Good Fellas, which itself was a kind of glossy reworking of Mean Streets.) Scorcese seems to have tamed his inner Hughes, and learned how to work within the system. Maybe now that Oscar's given him yet another brush-off, he'll say screw it and make some truly crazed films. That would be a real happy ending.

Posted by tedf at March 8, 2005 07:40 PM

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