The Aviator

Howard Hughes was not a well man. He was the perfect embodiment of Obsessive Compulsive disorder before it became a household term. His public life came to be scrutinized and he himself was seen as a freak which, considering his later years, is a cruel yet accurate epithet. This is all another way of saying that he is a ripe candidate for an epic film biography of his life, and the only surprising element of all this is that it took Hollywood so long to put one together.

The Aviator skips the traditional credits and goes straight to a scene from Hughes' childhood. In it, we learn of a Cholera scare he survived and how his mother protected him. Suddenly, we are taken to an airfield in the middle of the desert some years later where Hughes has just purchased the largest private air force in the world. It's partially in service of his directorial debut, Hell's Angels, which took three years to make and was looked upon as an expensive boondoggle, much in the same way Titanic was in 1997. And also like that film, it became a blockbuster, and we are launched into Hughes' careers in business, film and most of all aviation, for all the good times and bad.

There's one absence that struck me early on in this film, and that was the lack of detail concerning Hughes's childhood. Rare is the docudrama that doesn't indulge in numerous scenes of a character's formative years in order to map out their psyche (Witness Ray, who mayhap took one too many trips to that flashback well). With The Aviator, we have a brief and subtle scene that alludes to Hughes' later phobias of germs, and that's it. This is all well and good concerning his eccentricities, but what of his passions? In case you didn't get it from the title, Hughes's true love was flying. And as we begin our viewing of his lifelong passion on that airfield, we are left wondering how he came to this adoration of flight. It's a notable and unusual omission.

But just as we are left wondering where his interest in flying started, we are not at all left wondering ourselves what there is to like about it. When he finally gets the number of cameras he needs for a dogfight sequence, we follow him in an open-air cockpit as he films planes buzzing in all directions all around him. It's the kind of chaos that seems lifted from a Warner Brothers cartoon, and would be a thrilling sequence to see on an IMAX screen. Equally as chaotic, but in a more frightening way, is the re-creation of his horrible crash in 1946. We are once again in the cockpit with Hughes as he plows through homes and fire erupts all around him. The film should be seen for these sequences alone in how well they are done.

Article Author: Alonzo Mosley (FBI)

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