The Aviator
A couple of weeks back, I wrote about the difficult art of the biopic - how very few films manage to make it into a cinematic thrill instead of a rush-through name-checking important events and people. Ed Wood manages to pull this off, as does Gods and Monsters; neither tries to tell the entire life, which is a part of their success.
The Aviator also succeeds with flying, no pun intended, colours.
I think what all three have in common is an inherent pathos to counterbalance the traditional biopic narrative of the Great Man. (I.e. Great Man rises, fights against the odds, succeeds, then suffers some set backs, then succeeds again.) Gods and Monsters is set near the end of Whale's life, with only one flashback to his golden years. Ed Wood never lets us doubt for a moment Eddie is hopelessly untalented and will never make it in Hollywood - that's why it's such a love declaration to the losers of the system. The Aviator, while presenting the man who had, from one pov, everything (fame, sex, money, adventure), counterbalances this with his steadfast decline into insanity.
(As my all-time favourite movie, Lawrence of Arabia, among many other things could also be called a biopic which counterbalances the hero's success story by opening with his death, then a funeral in which he's called a self-conscious show-off, and then shows him being self-destructive and indeed destroyed by his success which is furthermore marred by the fact he half-knowingly was an instrument for good old fashioned imperialism and ends being wished away by both Arabs and Englishmen, it makes me wonder whether we the audience, cinematically speaking, forgive success only if comes in tandem with loss and tragedy. Not a nice thought but accurate, I guess.)
John Logan, the scriptwriter, has previously written my favourite fictional take on Orson Welles, the tv film about the making of Citizen Kane (with Lie v Schreiber as Welles and James Cromwell as W.H. Hearst). He took some liberties there - notably a pre-Kane meeting between Hearst and Welles - but managed to capture both personalities and their ambiguity fairly. In The Aviator, he does the same. This by necessity makes for some ruthless cutting. L.B. Mayer comes to stand in for each and every Hollywood mogul who was less than enchanted with Hughes and gives the usual "you'll never make it, kid" remarks at the beginning. (Poor Louis somehow always gets this job in Hollywood biopics. Is this because MGM was the most prominent studio of its day? He certainly wasn't the most disagreeable of moguls; compared with Jack Warner and Harry Cohn, he was downright nice.) We only get to see one of the teen girls Hughes exploits for sex, not dozens (but the point is made, and that's enough). There is only one representative of Pan Am and one senator respectively he locks horns with, so the audience knows who they are and can concentrate on them. And his major employees remain the same as well. Which all makes cinematic sense.
The other big script decision was to pick Hughes' relationship with Katherine Hepburn as the central romance. (As far as women are concerned; the even more central romance Hughes has is with airplanes, and Scorsese makes the point with some great transitions.) And to let it end not with the two of them drifting gently but inevitably apart, which is what happened, but because Hepburn leaves him for Spencer Tracy. (Whom in real life she only met several years after the break-up with Hughes.) This is clearly a ploy to enhance Hughes' status as a tragic character, but it works. It also allows Scorsese and Logan to pay some homage to the screwball comedies of the 30s (some of which starred Katherine Hepburn) at several points; my favourite of these homages is the use of the song "I can't give you anything but love, baby" when Hughes and Hepburn first make out. If you've ever watched Bringing up Baby by Howard Hawks (starring K.H. and Cary Grant and a leopard, and containing some lines which passed into folklore, including "because I suddenly woke up gay!" spoken by Cary Grant), you know why this is both very funny and touching. (As with any gag it loses with explanation, so I won't try.)
Cate Blanchett deserves the critical accolades she received for her Katherine Hepburn impersonation; she doesn't just have the mannerisms down, but also projects the legal aura, the zany energy of the young Kate, and the depth beyond said mannerisms in her later scenes with Hughes. Her last scene, when she comes to see him again after he already passed from neurotic to clinical, and can only talk to him through a locked door because he doesn't want her to see him as he is now, is incredibly moving.
The other major female of the film, Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, didn't fare so well with the critics, which I think is unfair. Granted, she doesn't have the striking sensuality Ava Gardner effortlessly projected, but she does capture the down-to-earth personality. Logan decided to follow Gardner's memoirs in presenting the relationship as one in which she's crystal clear on the point that she doesn't love Hughes but is a good friend even after his paranoia gave her ample reason to back off.
As for Howard Hughes himself: Leonardo di Caprio was not the first actor who came to mind when I heard there was a biopic in the works. And not because I think of him as a teen heartthrob. I still haven't seen Titanic; I saw him first in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, years pre-Titanic, where he managed to steal the film from Johnny Depp, no mean feat, as his younger autistic brother. So yes, he has the chops. He also has a very youthful face, and even the very good make-up can't really make him look around forty by the time the film ends, but then again, it's not necessary. Because his performance is that good. He certainly deserved his Golden Globe, and I hope he does get that Oscar. Given the two things Hughes is most famous for - air plane obsessed millionaire involved with lovely starlets, and mad germ-obsessed recluse in Vegas - it would have been tempting to divide the film into one half being young & charismatic, a la a young Robert Redford, and the other as declining and mad, doing the young de Niro act. But no, it's a unified performance, bearing out the script's way of uniting the two storylines. Even the young Hughes has already deeply neurotic tendencies; even the almost insane one has still that intelligence, energy and charisma to make one last stand before the Senate. I don't think the film is chickening out of the depth of insanity into which Hughes sunk; the sequence with him living in his projection room, with the camera showing row after row after row of bottles with his own urine, and him naked and with growing hair and fingernails, shows how his later existence was, and the very last scene, with Hughes, after his last triumph, repeating endlessly the one phrase "the way of the future", says all that needs to be said, and completes the tragedy.
Mind you, Logan and Scorsese could be accused of artfully evading other not so pleasant things about their hero. As one critic observed, neither Hughes' racism nor his anti-Semitism makes it into the picture (by now, I've looked it up, and yes, no African-American and no Jew was allowed to work for him). The sequence in which he's brought along for a visit with the Hepburn family is stacked in his favour; their liberalism is presented as a moneyed people talking about issues they have no idea about occasion, with him being given the punchline "no, money doesn't concern you, because you always had it, now excuse me, some people have to work for a living". Which is somewhat rich, coming from a man who always had more money every single day of his life than the assembled Hepburn clan had in the entirety of theirs. Moreover, far from being the idle rich who only talked but did not act, Hepburn Senior and one of Kate's brothers were doctors, and her mother was a feminist of the first hour who made a lot of difference in the fight for women's rights, birth control, etc. And this is typical in as much as all of Hughes' opponents in this film are presented as being in the wrong.
(Except for Ava Gardner when she discovers he has placed bugs everywhere, but this is a private matter as opposed to Hughes versus Pan Am, or Hughes versus the Censorship Committee, or Hughes versus the Senate.)
Still. Thinking of the film as a whole, I can't really see where this could have been changed without damaging the narrative structure. Hughes visiting the Hepburn clan, for example, is meant to illustrate his unease in Kate's world and inability to deal with it as well. And since the most important and ongoing battle Hughes fights throughout the movie is the one with his sanity, which makes the tragedy of the thing, for he is aware of slowly but surely losing his mind and though he tries to stop it, he only ever temporarily succeeds, all other opponents aren't that important anyhow. Including one who is in the right would probably sidetrack from the central tragedy.
One last note, regarding the director: I always thought Scorsese's pictures were visual feasts, but I never emotionally connected with his characters. Not so here. Which isn't to say I think this is his best movie. I'm sure that, say, Taxi Driver deserves its classic status. But The Aviator takes pity on its central character in a way no other Scorsese film does. Which might be why it won't become a classic but is much more affecting.
And because I'm a show-off this way: for those interested, some quotes from Katherine Hepburn's and Ava Gardner's memoirs re: Howard Hughes.
K.H.: One day an airplane circled overhead and circled and then landed on a dime in the filed next to use - too close. Who could that be? Who the hell would - ?
Cary Grant piped up: "That's my friend Howard Hughes."
I was somewhat taken aback because I had heard it rumoured that Hughes would like to meet me. And apparently this was how he'd figured it out. I gave Cary a black look, and we all had lunch. I never looked at Howard. What a nerve! The next step. I was playing golf with the pro at the Bel Air Country Club. We were on the seventh about to finish a nine-hole lesson. The noise of an airplane. Howard landed practically on top of us. ÄTook his clubs out of the plane and finished the nine with us. I must say it gave me pause. The Club was furious. Howard Hughes was nothing daunted. We finished the nine and I said, "Can I drop you somewhere?"
Howard Hughes was a curious fellow. He had guts and he had a really fine mind, but he was deaf - quite seriously deaf - and he was apparently incapable of saying, "Please speak up. I'm deaf." Thus if he was with more than one person, he was apt to miss most of the conversation. This was tragic. I think this weakness went a long way towards ruining Howard's life. (…)
***
My family were not too sympathetic to Howard. In the first place, he was everlastingly on the telephone. And the telephone was in the dining room. And we were a big family and always had visitors. Long telephone conversations did not suit the atmosphere.
And Luddy (her ex husband) was always there too. Especially on the golf course. And he was ever present with his movie camera. Howard couldn't stand this and objected. Dad made his famous remark: "Howard, Luddy has been taking pictures of all of us for many years before you joined us and he will be taking them long after you've left. He is part of this family. Go ahead. Drive. You need a seven iron."
Howard in a fury drove - six feet from the pin. He was a good gulfer. Sank a two. Not bad in a pinch. Cool.
***
Howard and I were indeed a strange pair. I don't think - what should I say? - I think that reluctantly he found me a very appropriate companion. And I think that I found him extremely appropriate too. We were a colourful pair. It seemed logical for us to be together, but it seems to me now that we were too similar. He came from the right street, so to speak. And so did I. We'd been brought up with ease. We each had a wild desire to be famous. I think that this was a dominant character failing. People who want to be famous are really loners. Or they should be. Certainly I felt that I was madly in love with him. And I think he felt the same way about me. But when it came right down to "What do we do now?" - I went East and he stayed West. We'd been together for about three years. Ambition beat love, or was it like? (…)
I did not want to marry Howard. I liked him. He was bright and he was interesting and his life was interesting, but obviously I was obsessed with my own failure and I wondered whether I could put it right. (…) I admired his nerve and his stamina. He seemed to admire me. He could hear me with my sharp voice. I was happy with him because, like me, he was a stay-at-home. I look back at our relationship and I think that we were both cool customers. He could do anything he wanted. And when I decided to move East, I think he thought, Well, I don't want to move East. I'll find someone who will stay West. I always thought it was lucky that we never married - two people who are used to having their own way should stay separate.
He was always a good friend. A remarkable man.
A.G.: What can I say about Howard Hughes? A world famous aviator, a multi-multimillionaire, a very complex man, courageous, bold and inventive? You bet. But also painfully shy, completely enigmatic, and more eccentric, honey, than anyone I ever met. For God's sake, he and I were born on the same day, and if you think that Capricorns fall into the same category, you know what that means. I was never in love with him, but he was in and out of my life for something like twenty very remarkable years.
***
Frank hated two men in my life - one past, one still present. Artie Shaw and Howard Hughes. Artie Shaw he could just about stomach because we had been respectably married and that was all over. Howard Hughes he saw red about. He refused to understand or believe that I had never slept with or even had a necking session with the man.
Howard Hughes was not helping things along either. His spies had me watched from the very first time he met me. Spying was one of Howard's continual pre-occupations. (…) I never gave a hoot about his spiels. I did my own thing. If he found out - and I'm sure he did - that I was sleeping with Mickey Rooney after our divorce, as well as making love with the likes of Howard Duff, Robert Taylor and Frank Sinatra, and he didn't like it, he could go and jump into a cold shower. But he went on about Frank over and over again. Maybe Howard had thought that after two failed marriages on my part the coast was clear for him to press his case, and now this singer was getting in the way. (…) Howard never took no for an answer. What can you expect from someone who shrugged off a brass bell tossed at the side of his head? Believe me, there was something scary about Howard's stop-at-nothing determination.
The Aviator also succeeds with flying, no pun intended, colours.
I think what all three have in common is an inherent pathos to counterbalance the traditional biopic narrative of the Great Man. (I.e. Great Man rises, fights against the odds, succeeds, then suffers some set backs, then succeeds again.) Gods and Monsters is set near the end of Whale's life, with only one flashback to his golden years. Ed Wood never lets us doubt for a moment Eddie is hopelessly untalented and will never make it in Hollywood - that's why it's such a love declaration to the losers of the system. The Aviator, while presenting the man who had, from one pov, everything (fame, sex, money, adventure), counterbalances this with his steadfast decline into insanity.
(As my all-time favourite movie, Lawrence of Arabia, among many other things could also be called a biopic which counterbalances the hero's success story by opening with his death, then a funeral in which he's called a self-conscious show-off, and then shows him being self-destructive and indeed destroyed by his success which is furthermore marred by the fact he half-knowingly was an instrument for good old fashioned imperialism and ends being wished away by both Arabs and Englishmen, it makes me wonder whether we the audience, cinematically speaking, forgive success only if comes in tandem with loss and tragedy. Not a nice thought but accurate, I guess.)
John Logan, the scriptwriter, has previously written my favourite fictional take on Orson Welles, the tv film about the making of Citizen Kane (with Lie v Schreiber as Welles and James Cromwell as W.H. Hearst). He took some liberties there - notably a pre-Kane meeting between Hearst and Welles - but managed to capture both personalities and their ambiguity fairly. In The Aviator, he does the same. This by necessity makes for some ruthless cutting. L.B. Mayer comes to stand in for each and every Hollywood mogul who was less than enchanted with Hughes and gives the usual "you'll never make it, kid" remarks at the beginning. (Poor Louis somehow always gets this job in Hollywood biopics. Is this because MGM was the most prominent studio of its day? He certainly wasn't the most disagreeable of moguls; compared with Jack Warner and Harry Cohn, he was downright nice.) We only get to see one of the teen girls Hughes exploits for sex, not dozens (but the point is made, and that's enough). There is only one representative of Pan Am and one senator respectively he locks horns with, so the audience knows who they are and can concentrate on them. And his major employees remain the same as well. Which all makes cinematic sense.
The other big script decision was to pick Hughes' relationship with Katherine Hepburn as the central romance. (As far as women are concerned; the even more central romance Hughes has is with airplanes, and Scorsese makes the point with some great transitions.) And to let it end not with the two of them drifting gently but inevitably apart, which is what happened, but because Hepburn leaves him for Spencer Tracy. (Whom in real life she only met several years after the break-up with Hughes.) This is clearly a ploy to enhance Hughes' status as a tragic character, but it works. It also allows Scorsese and Logan to pay some homage to the screwball comedies of the 30s (some of which starred Katherine Hepburn) at several points; my favourite of these homages is the use of the song "I can't give you anything but love, baby" when Hughes and Hepburn first make out. If you've ever watched Bringing up Baby by Howard Hawks (starring K.H. and Cary Grant and a leopard, and containing some lines which passed into folklore, including "because I suddenly woke up gay!" spoken by Cary Grant), you know why this is both very funny and touching. (As with any gag it loses with explanation, so I won't try.)
Cate Blanchett deserves the critical accolades she received for her Katherine Hepburn impersonation; she doesn't just have the mannerisms down, but also projects the legal aura, the zany energy of the young Kate, and the depth beyond said mannerisms in her later scenes with Hughes. Her last scene, when she comes to see him again after he already passed from neurotic to clinical, and can only talk to him through a locked door because he doesn't want her to see him as he is now, is incredibly moving.
The other major female of the film, Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, didn't fare so well with the critics, which I think is unfair. Granted, she doesn't have the striking sensuality Ava Gardner effortlessly projected, but she does capture the down-to-earth personality. Logan decided to follow Gardner's memoirs in presenting the relationship as one in which she's crystal clear on the point that she doesn't love Hughes but is a good friend even after his paranoia gave her ample reason to back off.
As for Howard Hughes himself: Leonardo di Caprio was not the first actor who came to mind when I heard there was a biopic in the works. And not because I think of him as a teen heartthrob. I still haven't seen Titanic; I saw him first in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, years pre-Titanic, where he managed to steal the film from Johnny Depp, no mean feat, as his younger autistic brother. So yes, he has the chops. He also has a very youthful face, and even the very good make-up can't really make him look around forty by the time the film ends, but then again, it's not necessary. Because his performance is that good. He certainly deserved his Golden Globe, and I hope he does get that Oscar. Given the two things Hughes is most famous for - air plane obsessed millionaire involved with lovely starlets, and mad germ-obsessed recluse in Vegas - it would have been tempting to divide the film into one half being young & charismatic, a la a young Robert Redford, and the other as declining and mad, doing the young de Niro act. But no, it's a unified performance, bearing out the script's way of uniting the two storylines. Even the young Hughes has already deeply neurotic tendencies; even the almost insane one has still that intelligence, energy and charisma to make one last stand before the Senate. I don't think the film is chickening out of the depth of insanity into which Hughes sunk; the sequence with him living in his projection room, with the camera showing row after row after row of bottles with his own urine, and him naked and with growing hair and fingernails, shows how his later existence was, and the very last scene, with Hughes, after his last triumph, repeating endlessly the one phrase "the way of the future", says all that needs to be said, and completes the tragedy.
Mind you, Logan and Scorsese could be accused of artfully evading other not so pleasant things about their hero. As one critic observed, neither Hughes' racism nor his anti-Semitism makes it into the picture (by now, I've looked it up, and yes, no African-American and no Jew was allowed to work for him). The sequence in which he's brought along for a visit with the Hepburn family is stacked in his favour; their liberalism is presented as a moneyed people talking about issues they have no idea about occasion, with him being given the punchline "no, money doesn't concern you, because you always had it, now excuse me, some people have to work for a living". Which is somewhat rich, coming from a man who always had more money every single day of his life than the assembled Hepburn clan had in the entirety of theirs. Moreover, far from being the idle rich who only talked but did not act, Hepburn Senior and one of Kate's brothers were doctors, and her mother was a feminist of the first hour who made a lot of difference in the fight for women's rights, birth control, etc. And this is typical in as much as all of Hughes' opponents in this film are presented as being in the wrong.
(Except for Ava Gardner when she discovers he has placed bugs everywhere, but this is a private matter as opposed to Hughes versus Pan Am, or Hughes versus the Censorship Committee, or Hughes versus the Senate.)
Still. Thinking of the film as a whole, I can't really see where this could have been changed without damaging the narrative structure. Hughes visiting the Hepburn clan, for example, is meant to illustrate his unease in Kate's world and inability to deal with it as well. And since the most important and ongoing battle Hughes fights throughout the movie is the one with his sanity, which makes the tragedy of the thing, for he is aware of slowly but surely losing his mind and though he tries to stop it, he only ever temporarily succeeds, all other opponents aren't that important anyhow. Including one who is in the right would probably sidetrack from the central tragedy.
One last note, regarding the director: I always thought Scorsese's pictures were visual feasts, but I never emotionally connected with his characters. Not so here. Which isn't to say I think this is his best movie. I'm sure that, say, Taxi Driver deserves its classic status. But The Aviator takes pity on its central character in a way no other Scorsese film does. Which might be why it won't become a classic but is much more affecting.
And because I'm a show-off this way: for those interested, some quotes from Katherine Hepburn's and Ava Gardner's memoirs re: Howard Hughes.
K.H.: One day an airplane circled overhead and circled and then landed on a dime in the filed next to use - too close. Who could that be? Who the hell would - ?
Cary Grant piped up: "That's my friend Howard Hughes."
I was somewhat taken aback because I had heard it rumoured that Hughes would like to meet me. And apparently this was how he'd figured it out. I gave Cary a black look, and we all had lunch. I never looked at Howard. What a nerve! The next step. I was playing golf with the pro at the Bel Air Country Club. We were on the seventh about to finish a nine-hole lesson. The noise of an airplane. Howard landed practically on top of us. ÄTook his clubs out of the plane and finished the nine with us. I must say it gave me pause. The Club was furious. Howard Hughes was nothing daunted. We finished the nine and I said, "Can I drop you somewhere?"
Howard Hughes was a curious fellow. He had guts and he had a really fine mind, but he was deaf - quite seriously deaf - and he was apparently incapable of saying, "Please speak up. I'm deaf." Thus if he was with more than one person, he was apt to miss most of the conversation. This was tragic. I think this weakness went a long way towards ruining Howard's life. (…)
***
My family were not too sympathetic to Howard. In the first place, he was everlastingly on the telephone. And the telephone was in the dining room. And we were a big family and always had visitors. Long telephone conversations did not suit the atmosphere.
And Luddy (her ex husband) was always there too. Especially on the golf course. And he was ever present with his movie camera. Howard couldn't stand this and objected. Dad made his famous remark: "Howard, Luddy has been taking pictures of all of us for many years before you joined us and he will be taking them long after you've left. He is part of this family. Go ahead. Drive. You need a seven iron."
Howard in a fury drove - six feet from the pin. He was a good gulfer. Sank a two. Not bad in a pinch. Cool.
***
Howard and I were indeed a strange pair. I don't think - what should I say? - I think that reluctantly he found me a very appropriate companion. And I think that I found him extremely appropriate too. We were a colourful pair. It seemed logical for us to be together, but it seems to me now that we were too similar. He came from the right street, so to speak. And so did I. We'd been brought up with ease. We each had a wild desire to be famous. I think that this was a dominant character failing. People who want to be famous are really loners. Or they should be. Certainly I felt that I was madly in love with him. And I think he felt the same way about me. But when it came right down to "What do we do now?" - I went East and he stayed West. We'd been together for about three years. Ambition beat love, or was it like? (…)
I did not want to marry Howard. I liked him. He was bright and he was interesting and his life was interesting, but obviously I was obsessed with my own failure and I wondered whether I could put it right. (…) I admired his nerve and his stamina. He seemed to admire me. He could hear me with my sharp voice. I was happy with him because, like me, he was a stay-at-home. I look back at our relationship and I think that we were both cool customers. He could do anything he wanted. And when I decided to move East, I think he thought, Well, I don't want to move East. I'll find someone who will stay West. I always thought it was lucky that we never married - two people who are used to having their own way should stay separate.
He was always a good friend. A remarkable man.
A.G.: What can I say about Howard Hughes? A world famous aviator, a multi-multimillionaire, a very complex man, courageous, bold and inventive? You bet. But also painfully shy, completely enigmatic, and more eccentric, honey, than anyone I ever met. For God's sake, he and I were born on the same day, and if you think that Capricorns fall into the same category, you know what that means. I was never in love with him, but he was in and out of my life for something like twenty very remarkable years.
***
Frank hated two men in my life - one past, one still present. Artie Shaw and Howard Hughes. Artie Shaw he could just about stomach because we had been respectably married and that was all over. Howard Hughes he saw red about. He refused to understand or believe that I had never slept with or even had a necking session with the man.
Howard Hughes was not helping things along either. His spies had me watched from the very first time he met me. Spying was one of Howard's continual pre-occupations. (…) I never gave a hoot about his spiels. I did my own thing. If he found out - and I'm sure he did - that I was sleeping with Mickey Rooney after our divorce, as well as making love with the likes of Howard Duff, Robert Taylor and Frank Sinatra, and he didn't like it, he could go and jump into a cold shower. But he went on about Frank over and over again. Maybe Howard had thought that after two failed marriages on my part the coast was clear for him to press his case, and now this singer was getting in the way. (…) Howard never took no for an answer. What can you expect from someone who shrugged off a brass bell tossed at the side of his head? Believe me, there was something scary about Howard's stop-at-nothing determination.