If the chaotic “Gangs of New York” or the little-seen “Bringing Out the Dead” left you wondering whatever happened to Martin Scorsese, fear not. “The Aviator,” his thrilling new biography of Howard Hughes, is Marty in full comeback mode.
It’s one of the best movies he’s ever made — certainly his strongest work since “GoodFellas” 14 years ago. And it’s inspired Leonardo DiCaprio to give the most complex, disciplined and enjoyable performance of his adult career. In his hands, Hughes is an annoying/amazing force of nature, the kind of unstoppable perfectionist who can inspire and drive people crazy at the same time.
He’s not quite like any version of the legendarily weird Hughes that we’ve seen before in the movies. Tommy Lee Jones played a stone-faced Hughes in a not-bad 1977 TV movie, George Peppard tried to make sense of a trashily fictionalized Hughes in “The Carpetbaggers,” while Jason Robards earned an Oscar nomination for playing Hughes as an aging nutcase in “Melvin and Howard.”
But this is something new. Scorsese and DiCaprio’s singular achievement is that they’ve found the comic side of Hughes without denying him his demons. They’ve also focused on his youth, his romance with airplanes and the movies (which came together in his early-1930s aerial drama “Hell’s Angels”) and his electrifying battles with corporate and political enemies.
The result is a high-energy comedy-drama that will appeal even to people who know nothing about Hughes, who died in 1976 and left a questionable legacy. Scorsese and his screenwriter, John Logan (“Gladiator”), choose to end their film in a moment of triumph, long before the debacles that the reclusive Hughes created in his later years.
While DiCaprio is the dominant presence, the movie is quite a showcase for its supporting cast, especially Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, who is portrayed as perhaps the chattiest and most committed of Hughes’ lovers (she seems, like him, to be ready for anything); Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, another famous lover who stands by her man at a critical moment; and Alan Alda as a conniving and relentless senator, Ralph Brewster, who tries to ruin Hughes’ airline in the most public way possible.
Less prominent but also effective are Alec Baldwin as an airline competitor, Jude Law as Errol Flynn, Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow and Kelli Garner as Hughes’ jailbait girlfriend, Faith Domergue. John C. Riley makes the most of his frequently explosive scenes as Hughes’ understandably exasperated business partner, Noah Dietrich, while Ian Holm and Matt Ross do the same with their less showy moments as Hughes loyalists.
Robert Richardson’s wide-screen cinematography easily adapts to the most intimate and spectacular episodes. He can make a mini-drama of Hughes’ obsessive hand-washing in one scene, then capture a suburban inferno as Hughes crashes an untested plane in Beverly Hills. Like Scorsese’s direction and DiCaprio’s performance, Richardson displays a professional confidence that’s exhilarating.