The Aviator - ***
Now Playing: (2004, Martin Scorsese) [seen in theatre]
Scorsese's epic-length portrait of the young Howard Hughes is a hugely entertaining and supremely confident piece of commercial filmmaking. I mean that in the best sense- the film isn't as psychologically probing as the director's best work, but it's a completely accessible but nonetheless masterfully-made film. The "one for them, one for me" approach Scorsese has taken lately pays off well, since it's impossible for him to ever go on autopilot even in hired-gun work- the occasional narrative weaknesses (the third act drags, frankly) are in the end outdone by his virtuoso filmmaking. The most obvious example of his stylistic noodling is his post-production color-tweaking so that the scenes from various years in Hughes' life take on the appearance of Technicolor movies of their respective period- dig the turquoise faux two-strip greens on the golf courses! The film-drunk style Scorsese brings to the film only adds to the movie-ness of it, making it less a pious great-man epic than a spirited yarn about a brash young man whose psychoses overwhelmed him in the end. Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes and especially Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn are pretty damned amazing here, in large part because they share Scorsese's spirit in the enterprise, playing their larger-than-life characters almost like they were figments of a writer's imagination instead of two of the most iconic Americans of the past century. The film also works well as an effects picture, with aerial footage that are surely almost all 1's and 0's, but are nonetheless rousing or (in the case of Hughes monumental XF-11 crash in Beverly Hills) harrowing. Scorsese's use of music is typically assured, with specific props for his use of Artie Shaw's "Nightmare" at several points in the film. THE AVIATOR isn't quite one of Scorsese's best, but with a career like his even second-tier films are still pretty awesome.