A True American Masterpiece

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The New York Sun

Let’s get this out of the way: Martin Scorsese deserves an Oscar – and not one of those Lifetime Achievement ones, when Hollywood sheepishly thanks a giant of cinema retroactively, embarrassed that they had neither the imagination nor the courage celebrate them in their prime.


And so, members of the Academy please give Martin Scorsese the best director award this year for “The Aviator”, a powerfully entertaining film that everything a Hollywood movie should be.


Mr. Scorsese is the last filmmaker of his generation to makes movies, rather than hollow spectacles (a la Spielberg), cynical marketing vehicles (a la Lucas), or withered homages to their former glories (Peter Bogdanovich and Robert Altman). Mr. Scorsese plants one foot in his past, but the past he yearns for is not his career’s bygone days but his youth, when he absorbed the best of Hollywood’s Golden era.


When he fails his films can be sloppy or derivative, like his two most recent ones, “Bringing Out the Dead” and “Gangs of New York.” But when he succeeds, he’s vibrant and relevant, entertaining us with cerebral social criticism, layered character studies, and narrative tsunamis that whisk us away at breakneck speeds.


Even while Mr. Coppola was reinventing the gangster flick and Mr. Spielberg was unleashing one of the greatest monster movies of all time, Mr. Scorsese, more than any of them, understood the power of genre. He understood that professional filmmaking is a genre business, and that one has to subvert and transcend genre to achieve a work of any lasting value.


So he’s turned in innovative twists on boxing pictures (“Raging Bull”), horror movies (“Cape Fear”), and one of the earliest Hollywood genres, the Biblical picture (“The Last Temptation of Christ”). He even one-upped Mr. Coppola by making a better gangster movie.


He does it again in “The Aviator,” tackling that box-office chestnut: the biopic. The film charts the rise, fall, and comeback of a quintessentially American character, maverick billionaire Howard Hughes. In Hughes, Mr. Scorsese has found a man who was a unique distillation of the American spirit and the madness of our modern day. Hughes, like Mr. Scorsese, spent a life wanting to be part of the system, but rebelling against it at the same time.


Test pilot, entrepreneur, movie producer, Hughes was a driven cowboy dreamer whose actual legacy is overshadowed by his infamous fate. He ended his life in a dank hotel room. The once high-flying daredevil, who dated Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn, had withered away to pathetic, frail old man, with hair grown long and fingernails curling, a crazy old recluse. A far cry, in other words, from Leonardo DiCaprio, not to mention his own former self.


The movie kicks off at a brash Coconut Grove party, the legendary club faithfully recreated as a vibrant den of wealthy hedonism. As Hughes, Mr. DiCaprio strides through the showers of glitter with a mixture of unstoppable confidence and heartbreaking insecurity.


Determined to re-create on film the dogfights of World War I without benefit of a studio, Hughes corners the tuxedoed head of MGM and politely requests an additional two cameras to complement his collection of 24. Hughes needs – just has to have – more cameras. A prototype for the independent filmmaker, Hughes is condescended to, told he’ll never make “Hell’s Angels.”


That’s just the sort of thing a self-made man needs to hear to succeed – and succeed he does, creating one of the first blockbuster talkies. And he doesn’t stop there. He helps develop the American mono-wing plane, breaks speed records, buys an airline, and suggests that by flying over 20,000 feet, commercial airplanes can soar over weather, thereby easing the fears of consumers.


The cameras seem to gravitate to the press-shy mogul who, while a bit of a teetotaler, is an unrepentant womanizer. The movie suggests that Hughes met his romantic match in Katharine Hepburn, played delectably by Cate Blanchett. Ms. Blanchett (who herself is being talked about for a best supporting actress nod) plays Hepburn as a fiercely intelligent tomboy, strong-willed and vulnerable. You can’t take your eyes off her.


In fact, you can’t take your eyes off “The Aviator,” even when it becomes painful to watch. Hughes, as we know, was plagued by severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. But unlike other recent movies about mental illness like the overrated “A Beautiful Mind” or Cronenberg’s marginally better “Spider” – in which mental illness is a special effect – “The Aviator” makes us see Hughes’s crippling affliction through the tortured eyes of Mr. DiCaprio.


That Hughes was able to overcome his own demons for so long is in itself heroic. You don’t pity this man; you root for him to will himself out of his bizarre, socially stunting funk.


“The Aviator” is a success on every level. You can sit back and absorb this tale of struggle and victory, thrill to the excellent computer-generated flight sequences, or applaud the final triumphs of Hughes’s life. You can also appreciate the film’s statements on American capitalism, that much-maligned, breathlessly praised system that at its best allows innovative, risk-taking individuals to soar and at its worst chews them up and spits them out.


The movie comments on celebrity and ambition, and even sneaks in a sly bit of political subtext. Our Texan, born to poverty, personifies the American Dream of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. In one scene, the awkward Hughes is sneered at and treated like blue-collar rabble by Hepburn’s aristocratic, socialist Connecticut family.


So give Mr. Scorsese the Oscar for two reasons. First, because he deserves it for his body of work. Second, because as he approaches his twilight years, he still can make a movie bursting with life, caught with the same restless cinematic eye that made him famous and some new tricks to boot. He can still coax an actor into inhabiting a character, and can still tickle our lazy frontal lobes while kicking us in the gut.


The New York Sun

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