Ray, Kinsey, The Aviator: Life Stories - Page 5

The irony of Kinsey's character is that he isn't given to temptation in the usual sense (except to be as uncompromising as his priggish father). My favorite moment uses this for comedy when Kinsey goes to an underground gay bar in Chicago to interview "subjects." He explains what he's after to one queen who turns to his companion and says something like, "Mary here's a professor and wants to talk to us about sex." We know we've been in the realm of romance, however, when Lynn Redgrave faces the camera in the last minutes to tell Kinsey how reading his book enabled her to express her lesbian love for a co-worker, and to thank him for saving her life. This contradicts Kinsey's own professed impartiality in talking about sex and is just Condon's way of assuring the liberal audience for this movie that Kinsey's romance is their romance.

Amusingly, Howard Hughes's taste for dating Hollywood actresses is not seen as a temptation in The Aviator. It's presented as heroic. Instead, his temptation takes the form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which the movie utterly fails to incorporate coherently into the romance of the daring industrial outsider who transforms aviation and moviemaking. Forget about whether Hughes actually did transform aviation (he certainly was not an important moviemaker) and focus on the generic structure of the movie. I'd prefer greater naturalism in biographical movies generally, so this is an odd complaint, but Hughes's obsessive-compulsive disorder seems to have been included in the script simply because it was true. The problem is that it doesn't fit with the rest of the movie, which is consciously romanticized, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as a blazing tungsten wire of a hero who, in the twenty years covered by the script, occasionally goes dark but doesn't seem to get any older (Hollywood's ultimate dream).

The Aviator decomposes into a predictable melodrama in which Juan Trippe, head of Pan Am, conspires with Maine senator Owen Brewster to get a state monopoly on international flights. Hughes, owner of TWA, battles his way out of his (tackily photogenic) psychotic funk to face them down with quips and facts and counter-accusations at Senate hearings. I also found the attention to Hughes's working life more scattered than in Ray or Kinsey. In addition, the flight sequences not only look computer-generated but the synthetic swooping camerawork is so disorienting the planes don't even look as if they're flying forward. (No movie directed by Martin Scorsese has ever felt more like work for hire. Scorsese was brought in by DiCaprio after Michael Mann dropped out so it's not surprising that it feels impersonal. All the same I can't believe another director would have got such enthusiastic reviews for the same quality of work. Once seasonal awards fever has abated, I doubt anyone will think of The Aviator as a pendant to Raging Bull, his blood-and-torment biopic of boxer Jake LaMotta.)

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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