When Rules Don’t Apply-Martin Scorsese’s “Aviator” (2004)-A Film Review      

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Aviator, starring Leonardo DeCaprio, Cate Blanchett and

an all-star cast, directed by Martin Scorsese, 2004   

Recently I reviewed a new film by an old time actor-director, 1960s-70s old time if you can believe that is now old time, Warren Beatty, under the title Rules Don’t Apply, giving his take, his homage really to the larger than life profile of Howard Hughes who epitomized for the generation of ’68 the craziness of having too much money in your pocket, of having too much discretionary dough to play around with. I led off with the following remarks:

“Billionaires these days are a dime a dozen, well maybe not that cheap but they are relatively more common than fifty or sixty years ago when a billion dollars was more than just walking around money. And like today most of the serious billionaires kept a low profile. But a guy like Howard Hughes (and today a guy President-elect Trump) liked to keep his name before the public if not his face. That simply premise is what drives this Warren Beatty-directed and written story line in the film under review, Rules Don’t Apply, although one could argue that the presence of the huge figure of Hughes was just a cover for a classic romantic comedy about the on and off again romance of a couple of underlings in his organization with a little bit of drama about Hughes’ various financial doings and exploits thrown in…”

That little film though actually only covered Hughes’ later years when he had lost some of his pizazz and maybe a great deal of his mental facilities. The film under review here Martin Scorsese’s “Aviator” takes a close look at the man when he was a swash-buckling aviator (something the film takes great care to emphasize presumably based on some comment Hughes had made when asked of all the various projects he had undertaken what did he consider himself in the grand scheme of things), inventor(including some very scary looking aircraft-scary because they from a visual perspective looked less than air-worthy), cutthroat aviation businessman (TWA when that was a huge name in aviation right alongside its vicious cutthroat competitor Pan Am)-and a devil-may-care film director with a harem (let’s call a thing by its right name) of up and coming starlets and a few stray established stars to boot (Kate Hepburn, Ava Gardner for openers).          

Hughes, played here by Leonardo DeCaprio, reflecting the youth angle that Scorsese was looking at, was a man driven by many passions and many phobias instilled at an early age. If those passions included a passion for his various flames (especially Hepburn and Gardner) as opposed to a desire to control some very strong-willed women it was not apparent from his demeanor in the film. On the other hand despite his stormy, bossy and controlling ways he really did love aviation-loved to fly and that came through as well. Also coming through was his sense of perfectionism as exhibited in the scenes where he is directing the originally silent film, Hell’s Angels, and anytime he got within two feet of any aircraft. Throughout the film we are witness as well to his obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) which at points paralyzed him and would eventually lead to at least one mental breakdown. In the end his was not a very sympathetic character but no question his was one of the big captains of industry in the days when humankind was taming the skies in the first half of the 20^th century. The all-star cast led by Cate Blanchett (as Hepburn) aided the flow of the film which otherwise would have been overwhelmed by the personality of Hughes as Scorsese conceived this biopic.