The Aviator

The Aviator is an Academy Award-winning 2004 biographical drama film, directed by Martin Scorsese. Theatrically, it was distributed in the U.S. by Miramax and outside the U.S. by Warner Bros. (with regions swapped for DVD release), and like many of Scorsese's films, was nominated for numerous Academy Awards, and went on to win 5 Academy Awards including Best Supporting Actress for Cate Blanchett. Roger Ebert, a respected American film reviewer, described the film and its subject Howard Hughes in these terms:

Synopsis

Summary

The movie is a biopic of the aviation pioneer Howard Hughes. It follows his life from the late 1920s through the 1940s, a time when Hughes was directing and producing Hollywood movies as well as test piloting his own groundbreaking new aircraft.

Hughes, orphaned at age 17, was the son of a Texan inventor, who left him most of his multi-million dollar tool company upon his death. At the time, he was a college student at Rice University. From there, he moved to Los Angeles to become a movie producer, helping fledgling actors launch their careers, such as Jean Harlow, whom he cast in Hell's Angels. He also produced Scarface. Later in his career, he branched out into other industries, such as electronics and most significantly, aviation. His company, Hughes Aircraft was responsible for the H-4 Hercules, nicknamed "Spruce Goose" by detractors. Hughes' mental deterioration with his obsessive-compulsive behavior is a major plot thread through the film.

The movie also details Hughes' romances with Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn, and his battles with Pan Am's Juan Trippe, who allegedly bribed Maine senator Owen Brewster into granting Pan Am a coercive monopoly on international registered air travel. Hughes admits to having Congressmen in his pocket, too, which he did in real life.

Detailed synopsis

The film begins with nine year old Hughes being bathed by his mother, who warns him of disease: "You are not safe." This shows the root of his obsession with germs. We next see him as a 22-year old preparing to direct Hell's Angels. He hires Noah Dietrich to run Hughes Tool Co, while he oversees the flight sequences for the film. He is two cameras short and unsuccessfully tries to get loaners from Louis B. Mayer, who laughs at him and tells him to go back to Texas. Realizing that the audience will not be able to have a sense of space from the shot dogfight footage, Hughes becomes obsessed with finding "clouds that look like giant breasts full of milk" to re-shoot against. He hires UCLA meteorologist Professor Fitz to determine the perfect formation, and ends up waiting eight months. When the Professor tells him there are clouds in Oakland, California, Hughes moves production there, and re-shoots the dogfight himself.

By 1929, the film is finally complete, but, while watching The Jazz Singer, Hughes realizes that "talkies" will become the rage, meaning Hell's Angels will have to be re-shot for sound, costing another year and $1.7 million. The film is a huge hit, and Hughes is the one laughing now. He makes Scarface and The Outlaw. However, there is one goal he relentlessly pursues: aviation. During this time, he also pursues Katharine Hepburn. The two go to nightclubs, play golf, and fly together, and as they grow closer, move in together as well. During this time Hepburn becomes a major support and confidant to Hughes, and helps alleviate the symptoms of his Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder somewhat.

As Hughes's fame grows, he is seen with more starlets. He takes an interest in commercial-passenger travel, and purchases majority interest in Transcontinental and Western Air (T&WA). In 1935, he test-flies the H-1 Racer, breaks the speed record of Charles Lindbergh, and crashes in a beet field. "Fastest man on the planet," he boasts to Hepburn. Three years later, he flies around the world in three days, shattering the previous record by four days. Meanwhile, Juan Trippe, owner of Pan American Airlines, and Senator Owen Brewster worry over the possibility that Hughes might beat them in the quest for commercial expansion. Brewster has just introduced the Commercial Airline Bill, which will give world expansion solely to Pan Am. Trippe advises Brewster to check to the "disquieting rumors about Mr. Hughes."

Hepburn takes Hughes to meet her family in Connecticut, which turns into a disaster. When, over lunch, her mother tells him that "we don't care about money," he shoots back "That's because you've always had it," in effect, exposing the socialist-minded Hepburns as snobs and hypocrites. Back on the set of her new film, Katharine finds herself confiding about her escalating difficulties with Howard to Spencer Tracy. She finally tells Hughes she has fallen in love and is leaving him. Howard responds by burning all his clothes that night.

He soon has a new interest: 15-year old Faith Domergue. He also fights the Motion Picture Association of America over the steamy scenes in The Outlaw. He learns of Pan Am's efforts to run TWA off the map. He secures contracts with the Army on two projects, a spy plane and a troop plane, by throwing a massive dinner party. He is hounded by the press after being caught with Ava Gardner by an enraged Domergue, who rams her car into theirs. Hughes meets with a shady tabloid editor to purchase the photo negatives taken of Hepburn with Tracy before they become public.

By 1945, Hughes has only finished the XF-11 Spy plane and is building the H-4 Hercules ("Spruce Goose") flying boat. The budget is increasing, the deadline is looming, and Hughes starts to show signs of alarming behavior, such as worry over dust and germs in the air and repeating phrases over and over. That July, he takes the XF-11 for a test flight. The engines give out; Hughes attempts to land it on a golf course in Beverly Hills, but crashes into a neighborhood. He is rushed to the hospital, where he slowly recuperates. He learns the Spruce Goose is no longer needed by the Army, but orders production to continue. When he is discharged, the whole TWA fleet is built and ready to go, but he is in big danger of being bankrupt by the airline and the plane.

Afraid of the media trying to find him, Hughes places microphones and taps Ava's phone lines to keep track of any suspicious activity. After being confronted by Gardner, he returns home to find the FBI searching his house for incriminating evidence of him embezzling government funds. The incident is both a powerful trauma for Hughes and gives his enemies knowledge about his condition. Hughes meets with Brewster, who offers to drop the charges if Hughes supports the CAB Bill and sells the TWA stock to Trippe. During the meeting Brewster carefully and deliberately does things to inflame Hughes' OCD. Hughes defiantly refuses but sinks into a deep depression afterwards, shutting himself in his screening room, terrified of germs, urinating into dozens of empty milk bottles, with his OCD growing exponentially worse. Hepburn visits him, talking to him from outside the door, and thanks him for buying the negatives and apologizes for how wrong things went with them. She begs Hughes to let her help him, to either let her in or open the door and come out, but he does neither. Trippe then pays Hughes a visit, but an enraged Hughes vows he will never sell TWA to Trippe. Trippe warns Dietrich that the world will see what Howard has become if he goes to the Hearings. After nearly three months, Hughes finally emerges and prepares to face the Senate, with encouragement from Ava Gardner, who forces him to get cleaned up. She also tells Hughes to "Do it for me", referring to the hearing, and that seems to give Hughes the strength to handle the inquiry.

Hughes arrives at the Hearings, and starts off with counter-claiming Brewster's charges. Humiliated and enraged by this turn of events, the Senator formally states that Hughes charged the Defense Department $56 million USD for planes that never flew. Then, Hughes states that other companies did not deliver planes either, yet they have not been charged with embezzlement. He also shows that he himself poured millions of dollars into the planes, losing money in the process. In a final blow to Brewster and Trippe's Pan Am monopoly scheme, Hughes exposes their offer to drop the charges, if he sold his stock over to Trippe and Pan Am, and he adds that on their little date, Brewster told him this would never take place, if he would just give up, and also exposes the longstanding ties and bribes between Brewster and Trippe. Hughes is acquitted of all charges, the CAB bill is defeated, Trippe's plan for Pan Am's global expansion is ruined, and TWA starts to expand to Europe and the Far East. Hughes then proves he was right about the Spruce Goose by personally flying it himself. After the flight, as he talks to Noah and Odie about a new jet-liner for TWA and makes a date with Ava at the party to celebrate Hughes seems to be free of his inner demons, until he suddenly sees three businessmen in suits and white gloves who seem to be menacing him. Are they his future "Mormon Mafia" or figments of his imagination? Dietrich's reaction implies that they are real; after Hughes asks if the businessmen work for him, he responds "Everybody works for you Howard." This suddenly sets him into an obsessive-compulsive fit, constantly repeating "The way of the future" in reference to the jet aircraft the three men had been discussing. Dietrich and Odie hide Hughes in a bathroom and keep him there while they can get a doctor. Howard has a flashback of his boyhood self, realizing that he has accomplished all his goals, and already built the grounds for the future. Despite that, and despite everything he does, Hughes cannot stave off the encroaching madness. As the film ends, he keeps muttering "the way of the future." The darkness is closing in around him, Hughes finally succumbs to his fears and obsessions.

Fact versus fiction

The film takes many historical liberties. Ella Rice is not seen or mentioned although Hughes was married to her when he made Hell's Angels. His lover at the time, Billie Dove, is not mentioned either. Ava Gardner and Linda Darnell are referenced before either entered films. The scenes of Hughes and Hepburn at her parents' home is fiction (as per her autobiography) as is his "audition" of Domergue (as per her book on their relationship). Hepburn left Hughes before she met Spencer Tracy. The scene where Hughes burns all his clothes is portrayed in the film as a reaction to Hepburn leaving him, but in real life is believed to be a result of syphilis which he contracted as a young man influencing his behavior. Syphilis is never mentioned in the film. Hughes had brown hair and eyes, but DiCaprio does not wear brown contact lenses or dye his hair brown. Hughes's well-documented racism and anti-Semitism and rumored bisexuality are also overlooked. In his review, Rex Reed wrote that the people who knew Hughes told him the movie bore little resemblance to him.

Style

For the first fifty minutes of the film, scenes appear in shades of only red and cyan blue; green objects are rendered as blue. This was done, according to Scorsese, to emulate the look of early two-color movies, in particular the Multicolor process, which Hughes himself owned. Many of the scenes depicting events occuring after 1935 are treated to emulate the saturated appearance of three-strip Technicolor. Other scenes were stock footage colorized and incorporated into the film. The colorization effects were created by Legend Films.

Main cast

External links

Official site
High Life by Robert Richardson, ASC.

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