E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fly-by knight Howard Hughes makes a ruling-class hero in The Aviator BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Aviator Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by John Logan. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, John C. Reilly, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda, Jude Law, Matt Ross, Adam Scott, Gwen Stefani, Ian Holm, Danny Huston, and Kelli Garner. A Miramax Pictures release (169 minutes). At the Boston Common, the Fenway, the Fresh Pond, and the Circle/Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.

Martin Scorsese doesn’t make bio-pics that often, but he isn’t shy about whom he chooses. Jesus Christ, the Dalai Lama (a/k/a the Buddha), boxing chump Jake LaMotta, Mafioso tell-all Henry Hill, and now entrepreneurial overreacher Howard Hughes have served as his subjects, and in a sense, each has presented the same story told in the same style.

It’s the universal tale of the individual isolated in and doomed by time, driven to recognize or forge a destiny and tempted by compromise, learning in the end, or the beginning, that all is illusory. In style, these films are so subjective as to seem superficial. In the case of The Aviator, Scorsese renders the passing people, labors, loves, triumphs, defeats, and madness of Hughes’s life into a spectacle viewed, as in one of the film’s final images, by the bewildered hero alone in the darkness of his private screening room.

The film’s opening is perhaps more ambiguous and haunting. Like the recent Ray, The Aviator starts with a recurring flashback to Hughes’s childhood, though unlike the one in Ray, it’s never neatly resolved. In a Rembrandt-like composition, Howard’s young mother tenderly, almost lasciviously, bathes her boy, who stands upright, burnished in the dusk light, in a big golden basin. She tells him of the epidemic raging outside and warns him about germs.

So do we need any further insight into why Hughes was driven to make the world’s greatest movies and the world’s fastest planes and become the world’s richest man? Why he ended up muttering "the wave of the future" over and over in his shuttered office while peeing into rows of empty milk bottles? There aren’t very many other clues to grab onto for the viewer, anymore than, I’d guess, there were for Hughes himself.

Those who fail to glean elucidation into Hughes’s mystery from the details of Scorsese’s fluidly elliptical narrative won’t be reassured by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio. Will the boy ever grow up? He’s just turned 30 and he still looks like the punk in This Boy’s Life. And anyone who’s heard Hughes speak, as he does in newsreels of his 1947 testimony before Congress (which is re-created in The Aviator), will observe that DiCaprio’s voice is about two octaves higher.

The funny thing is that long before he grows his moustache, never mind his toenails, DiCaprio grows into the part. Maybe his callow brashness is necessary to overcome our last images of Hughes before his death in 1976, the harrowing, loony wraith bedeviled by infinite obsessions and compulsions and possessed of the infinite funds needed to pay for them. Instead, DiCaprio calls to mind Hughes as the world first knew him, the wunderkind and pioneer.

Before there was Spielberg, there was Hughes, spending three years to make his World War I flying-ace extravaganza Hell’s Angels (1930), a production involving hundreds of whirling biplanes and zeppelins. Re-created in The Aviator, the production evokes the technological wonder of the era suggested by Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. He flew around the world in record-breaking time, gave flying lessons to Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett, transcending mimicry), and bought TWA. All before he was 35.

Orson Welles would spot a come-uppance on the way, a missing Rosebud to account for. But Scorsese and DiCaprio never go far beyond the unformed child in the basin with his uncomfortably Oedipal dreams. That first image is reflected in Hughes’s many relationships. (Scorsese touches on just a few, and none of those with men.) Blanchett’s Hepburn and Kate Beckinsale’s Ava Gardner are headstrong and fiercely independent (Gardner’s cracking Hughes on the head with an ashtray might be the film’s most violent image), but they rally at once to their manchild when, Icarus-like, he starts to fall. And fall he does, twice, one crash almost comic, the other horrific and near-fatal. Then comes the worst fall of all, into madness. In the film’s most touching moments, Hepburn and Gardner comfort him and give him strength to emerge, temporarily, into sanity again.

Because Hughes still had work to finish. His breakdown coincided with that congressional appearance, when he was called to testify before Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), a functionary of Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin), head of TWA’s corporate rival Pan Am. The way Hughes pulls himself together to rout his foes is as rousing as anything in Raging Bull. He was actually a good guy, Howard Hughes. He fought against corporate monopoly and against censorship. (His struggle to release The Outlaw might have gotten more time in the film.) And he was also, in his own way, a regular joe, dazzled by the glory of his life, and by its disastrous end.