Scorsese: The Aviator (2004)

Released after the critical and commercial disappointment of Gangs of New York, The Aviator represents the start of a new classicism in Martin Scorsese’s work, a taste for enshrining American cinematic history that would gradually converge with his more curatorial and documentary efforts over the next decade. It’s also the first of his collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio in which you really feel the synergetic presence of one of the great auteur-actor rapports. For both those reasons, it feels right that the film itself is a larger-than-life effort, a study of Howard Hughes that’s more interested in the speed and scale of his personality than his personality itself – which also means the speed and scale of his final obsession with privacy, his efforts to shroud his last days in a life of spectacle. As if in deference to those final wishes, the film seems somewhat quarantined from its subject matter, unfolding one scrupulously sterile, germ-free environment after another, capturing the cold, continuous calculations of the obsessive-compulsive more than any conventional character study or period piece could hope to achieve. Not only is the beautiful set design is at its most beautiful when elaborating the endless bathrooms where Hughes performed his OCD rituals - or at least when it makes the spaces he moves through feel like a single, perfectly appointed bathroom – but Hughes himself feels somewhat like a prop, as imperviously inanimate as he clearly longed to be. In his wake, everything is touched with an air of fantasy, almost a childrens’ fantasy, closer to Hugo than any other film in Scorsese’s career, and just as fascinated with that moment in cinematic history at which the camera felt as if it might spontaneously and suddenly evolve into some even more sublime technology – in this case, high-velocity air travel and competitive commercial air transit, along with a paranoid fantasy of total surveillance that was bigger than either. A producer in the most prodigious, American sense, Hughes – or DiCaprio’s Hughes – makes the film feel produced more than directed, or at least allows you to feel Michael Mann as producer more than you otherwise might, chilling Scorsese’s endless sequence shots and phantom rides until they’re well below zero. Ten years later, this mode has become so familiar for Scorsese that it’s quite startling to see it adopted as consciously and concertedly as it is here. And yet, like Hughes himself, it seems made for retrospection, a grandiloquent dream that only starts to resonate once it’s eclipsed the dreamer.