Knight at the Movies ARCHIVES
Young Howard and Bobby Baby:
The Aviator, Beyond the Sea
12-29-04 Knight at the Movies column
By Richard Knight, Jr.
























The Aviator is a perfect merging of director Martin Scorsese’s love of excess and classic Hollywood.  And no
one in their heyday, Scorsese 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
Scorsese.  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 Scorsese 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 Scorsese 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, Scorsese 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.

Scorsese 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 – Scorsese’s masterpiece instead of a good movie with masterful
scenes.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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.
Scorsese returns to form, Spacey sings for his supper