At the Movies: The Aviator

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"Fasten your seatbelts and strap yourself in for The Aviator. This entrepreneurial epic soars!!!" -- Patrick J. Sauer, Inc.com

This is my Gene Shalit riff, a pathetic attempt at gushing my way onto a Miramax movie poster, but all hyperbole aside, it's not that far off from how I feel about The Aviator. It's a thoroughly entertaining movie, a rip-roaring paean to the ballsy life of the pre-total-insanity Howard Hughes and his all-encompassing obsession with owning the skies. The film opens with a brief scene from Hughes' childhood showing the origin of the germaphobia that would later cripple him, but then it jumps right into the whirling dervish approach Hughes took towards life, and lands on the set of Hell's Angels, the most expensive film ever made up to that point. It's clear that Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) answered to no one and threw his fortune around in his relentless pursuit of perfection. To that end, he moves the entire set from Southern California to Oakland because his handpicked weatherman guarantees clouds, and then later he re-shoots the entire picture because people want talkies.

The Aviator is at its best when Hughes wills his dreams to come true with a cocksure glint in his eye, be it setting a speed record of 352 mph in his self-designed H1 airplane or proving to the United States government that hell yes, the Spruce Goose can fly. It's a credit to screenwriter John Logan and director Martin Scorsese that neither Hughes' steady parade of Hollywood starlets, ill-fated love affair with Kate Hepburn (a marvelously off-kilter Cate Blanchett) or haunting obsessive-compulsive disorder overwhelm the main thread, that aviation became Hughes' life. The film lays bare the mano-a-mano battles Hughes fought with his company, TWA, against Juan Trippe (played with studious measure by Alec Baldwin) and his company, Pan Am, which had the backing of the federal government in the person of weasely Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda is a far-cry from the noble Hawkeye Pierce). Hughes relishes the riveting corporate war for the skies. It seems to be the only thing keeping his demons at bay.

Late in the film, there's a great scene where a naked, hairy Hughes teeters on the brink of total madness on one side of a door, while a composed Trippe taunts him on the other, which rallies Hughes to pull himself together for one last fight. Weighted down with the straightforward vengeance-is-mine role in Gangs of New York, DiCaprio opens it up as Hughes and lets it fly (Shalit #2). DiCaprio nails the charm, passion, loneliness and mental deterioration that simultaneously coursed through Hughes' veins (which would have been so much calmer if only he'd invented Zoloft.)

Few Inc. entrepreneurs will ever get the chance to revolutionize air travel while bedding glamorous move stars (although I've heard whispers of Richard Branson and Lindsay Lohan), but they will still recognize the go-for-broke drive it takes to change the world, or at least a small patch of it. Hughes had the same day-to-day issues as any business owner: bean counters, bureaucrats and naysayers, even if when he "went down in flames," it was both literally and figuratively. There are few movies made about the old-fashioned American entrepreneur, so be glad that Martin Scorsese has made a good one. And with apologies to Gene Shalit ...

"Howard Hughes himself would have been obsessed with The Aviator, it's the Spruce Goose of aviation-themed biopics!!!" -- Patrick J. Sauer, Inc.com

(I feel dirty and need to wash my hands. Just go see it.)