I watched The Aviator on my train ride up to Boston earlier this month. It never quite bored me enough to make me quit watching it, but I felt that wasn’t a good enough review/blurb to share with you, dear reader.
Fortunately for me, Michael Blowhard just watched and reviewed it, and I’ll second his sentiment: “dull, but watchable.”
The film’s primary drawback is that it has a narrative angle that imposes repetitiveness. The picture — which stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes — confines itself to a relatively brief stretch of Hughes’ life: from his early years in Hollywood making “Hell’s Angels” to his triumph / failure with his giant wooden airplane, the Spruce Goose. (There’s nothing of Hughes’ later years as a legendary recluse surrounded by tissue paper and Mormons.) During the 20ish-year stretch that the film covers, Hughes achieves great things. He’s also first touched by, then eaten-away at by obsessive-compulsive behavior.
The film’s dramatic idea is that, as Hughes’ mental illness grew worse, he channeled more and more of his creativity and his brains into managing an ever-shrinking personal world. As valid or not-valid as this idea is in psychological terms, it means that the film has nowhere to go that you can’t see coming. One after another, gorgeous new planes are wheeled out of hangars; one after another, Hughes’ obsessive-compulsive behavior problems grow more dire. That cycle — a new engineering triumph that’s contrasted with a new pitch of madness — repeats itself over and over until, you know, things finally get really bad.
Or, as my buddy Paul Di Filippo put it, “I’m much more interested in the Howard Hughes who totally lost his mind. This movie quit right before that.”