Seth Lamey
With 2002’s Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese and his then-emerging lead Leonardo DiCaprio’s collaboration had only just begun. Then, it was the director’s long-planned project of a Howard Hughes biopic that would continue the journey for the two, a collaboration that would total six films in the 22 years following their first pairing. DiCaprio was Hollywood’s premier leading man by the time of The Aviator in 2004, having already collaborated with James Cameron (Titanic), Steven Spielberg (Catch Me If You Can), and Scorsese (Gangs of New York). Depicting the exciting and dark subject matter of Howard Hughes’ life would be a rewarding task for both; their biopic explored the life of a man who was a complex savant as both a pioneer in aviation and a producer in Golden Age Hollywood.
At the end of the century, Scorsese held respect and admiration with critics, audiences, and the cinephile community alike. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas all were regarded as not only best films of their respective years but for many that of of their respective decades. Yet with countless other great films in his filmography, Scorsese still had not won the elusive Best Picture Academy Award for one of his films, the bow to wrap around his great legacy. The Aviator would be seen as his next big chance. Even with a large budget of $110 million, the film was still a hit at the box office doubling its budget and was a hit with the critics. The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, winning five including Best Supporting Actress for Cate Blanchett. DiCaprio and Scorsese would both earn nominations for acting and directing. It was Million Dollar Baby taking home the Best Picture award that year, postponing Scorsese’s win yet again. Luckily he would be rewarded two years later with The Departed and DiCaprio would finally win his Oscar a decade later (without Scorsese behind the camera) with The Revenant.
It is easy to see why Scorsese would be drawn to an eccentric millionaire like Howard Hughes. Hughes started as a filmmaker, producing the largest “epic” of its time with the film Hell’s Angels . The Aviator focuses on Hughes’ life from 1927 to 1947 as he juggles film making, purchasing TWA airlines, designing new airplanes (including the giant Hercules plane), dating Hollywood stars, and battling competitors/politicians. Scorsese and DiCaprio also dive head first into Hughes’ battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder, showcasing it as a blessing and a curse for the hard working businessman/aviator. While the project had been in Hollywood limbo for years, it was DiCaprio who saw it as his chance to showcase his leading man prowess and knew Scorsese’s craft behind the camera could make such a production work. Scorsese’s devotion to classic cinema would come in handy for reproduction of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
With numerous flying sequences in the film, Scorsese and production designer Dante Ferretti used scaled models and motion-controlled miniatures to maintain authenticity after CGI use on Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor garnered negative criticism. Lavish sets and costume design helped re-create classic Hollywood, and cinematographer Robert Richardson shot much of the stylized cinematography Scorsese had idealized. Scorsese and Richardson also formulated an Oscar-winning unique look for the film. As a nod to bipack films of the 1920s, they saturated scenes in colors of red and cyan blue for the first act, including green objects appearing blue as scene in the golfing scene with Hughes and Hepburn. Later in the film they shoot post-1935 scenes as three-strip Technicolor as a nod to the saturated red, greens, and blue of the color era. While other film makers may have done an adequate job telling a Howard Hughes biopic, few many have had the creative innovation to re-create areas of film history with the love and admiration of Scorsese. Even with a near three-hour runtime, Scorsese stitches the film together with energy that the audience can’t help but be captivated by the world building. Howard Shore provides a classical musical score to represent the time. As the film follows Hughes through scenes of flight and dramatic twists and turns, it always feels like history is unfolding.
Hollywood has always had a fascination with the “great American man” biopic, case studies in what makes some of the biggest success stories. Although only loosely based on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Heart, 1941’s Citizen Kane may be the original American biopic about public persona great man archetype with a mysterious personal life behind its titular character. The Aviator begins with Howard Hughes as a boy, in the midst of a cholera outbreak in Texas and making proclamations to be the one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. The film would depict the highs and lows of Hughes’ adult life, with the planes he flies high and fast in the sky before some of them crash and burn serving as metaphors for his own success and failure. Scorsese and DiCaprio understand this vital duality in the life of Howard Hughes, showcasing his aviation sequences with a fleeting and energetic flair and contrasting with the horrors of his crashes and manic episodes of his obsessive compulsions. Scorsese and his long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker stitch together these scenes with intense but kinetic swiftness.
More than a few similar biopics of the troubled but brilliant “great men” would follow The Aviator in the early 21st century, with films about tech billionaires Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. The Social Network, Jobs, and Steve Jobs follow a similar formula as The Aviator showing the benefit of society that social media and advancements in technology have, while also balancing the negatives that marketable and swift change can have on their creators.
While the craft and technique of Scorsese films sets the tone and atmosphere for The Aviator, he directs his talent ensemble to inhabit the world created for them. DiCaprio as Howard Hughes is as devoted to a role as you will see him in his career. He exudes the good looks and charm of the playboy business man, while also highlighting how OCD both helped and destroyed his career. During one particular scene, DiCaprio as Hughes multitasks between making notes about his upcoming film The Outlaw, meticulously chooses between steering wheels, eyes up a janitor during an episode of germaphobic paranoia, and goes through blueprints in his head for his project the “Spruce Goose.” DiCaprio executes the tics, twitches, and anxiety of Hughes throughout the film. He adds Howard Hughes to the Scorsese stable of tortured male protagonists with Travis Bickle, Jack LaMotta, and Henry Hill. He sits in the darkness of Hughes’ own personal theater at the end of act two, hair and beard disheveled with his own madness as company. The Aviator ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, a non-promise of a coda that will never come. Hughes had a disturbed closing chapter to his life far from the glory of Hollywood or aviation hangers, instead cooped up in his Vegas hotels growing out his hair and fingernails in deep seclusion.
Alongside DiCaprio, the rest of the cast for The Aviator is up to the task, with Cate Blanchett as movie actress Kathryn Hepburn being the standout. Rewarded that year with Best Supporting Actress, Blanchett would stand toe-to-toe with DiCaprio’s Hughes throughout the film adding charm, elegance, and an eccentric counterweight. She slipped into the role of the movie star quite well, while also not pushing the boundary of caricature. John C. Reilly, Alan Alda, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe, Kate Beckinsale, and Jude Law would also fill out the ensemble of real actors and Hughes’ antagonists of the time. Alan Alda as Senator Owen Brewster and Alec Baldwin as Pan-Am executive Juan Tripp shine as third-act heels for Howard Hughes to stake his career reputation on the line while also fighting his own personal demons. The 20-year trip through Hughes’ life showcases his brilliant engineering mind, bold risks as a film maker and business man, and the personal battles he fought both internal and external.
Each later DiCaprio/Scorsese collaboration followed similar character types and genre trends. The Departed showed an undercover cop struggling for information and survival among Boston organized crime. Shutter Island placed DiCaprio inside a riddle of what mysterious truth is to be found at an insane asylum and potentially within himself. The Wolf of Wall Street depicted the real-life debauchery of Wall Street mogul Jordan Belfort in a sharp-as-nails satire about excess greed in America. Killers of the Flower Moon cast DiCaprio as a white man married to an Osage Native American who willfully turns a blind eye to her people unjust murders.
Scorsese and DiCaprio are drawn to the darkness within their male protagonists, and the darkness within Howard Hughes in The Aviator is where they put that duality of man on full display. The Aviator was well-recognized at the time in the mainstream and film communities alike, even if it didn’t win the “big” awards. Scorsese would finally get his Oscar two years later with 2006’s The Departed. I would say—and others might agree—that The Aviator is the better film, the one in which their partnership truly took flight, perhaps Scorsese’s best of the 2000s and solidly in the top 10 works of his 50-year career. The film cemented DiCaprio as Scorsese’s go-to lead man after his terrific run with Robert DeNiro, and the two would collaborate on four more very good films. The production designs and ensemble cast dazzle in The Aviator, setting the bar high for Hollywood biopics in the 21st century.
