Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator takes on the strangest American of the twentieth century and refuses to look away. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Howard Hughes, the aviation pioneer and director of Hell’s Angels, across two decades of triumph and collapse. The film runs 170 minutes. It was written by John Logan. It was released in the United States on December 25, 2004. It grossed $214 million on a budget of $110 million.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
The Bath in Houston
The Aviator opens in 1913 Houston. Hughes is eight years old. His mother gives him a bath and teaches him to spell “quarantine.” She warns him about the recent cholera outbreak. That single scene does more work than any later diagnosis. The film does not label Hughes. It shows where the fear started and lets it spread.
Fourteen years later, in 1927, Hughes begins directing Hell’s Angels. He hires Noah Dietrich, played by John C. Reilly, to run the day-to-day operations of his business empire. After The Jazz Singer arrives, the first partially talking film, Hughes decides to convert his picture to sound. The film is a hit. He orders it recut anyway.
That refusal to stop is the engine of the whole movie. Scorsese keeps the camera moving, but the subject never does. Hughes wins and immediately finds the win unsatisfactory.
Hepburn, Gardner, and the Women Who Leave
Cate Blanchett plays Katharine Hepburn. She eases the symptoms of Hughes’s worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder and germaphobia. Then she grows tired of his eccentricity and his workaholism. She leaves him for Spencer Tracy.
Kate Beckinsale plays Ava Gardner. Hughes finds her after a brief involvement with 15-year-old Faith Domergue. He still carries feelings for Hepburn. He bribes a reporter to keep her affair with the married Tracy out of the press. The gesture is controlling and tender at once, and the film knows it.
The supporting cast is deep. Alec Baldwin plays Juan Trippe, the Pan Am chairman. Alan Alda plays Senator Ralph Owen Brewster. Jude Law plays Errol Flynn. Gwen Stefani plays Jean Harlow. Ian Holm plays Professor Fitz. Danny Huston plays Jack Frye. Adam Scott plays Johnny Meyer.
Two Records and a Beet Field
In 1935, Hughes test-flies the H-1 Racer. He pushes it to a new speed record. The aircraft runs out of fuel and he crash-lands into a beet field. Three years later, he flies around the world in four days, breaking the world record. Then he buys majority interest in Transcontinental & Western Air.
Trippe asks Brewster to introduce the Community Airline Bill. The bill would give Pan Am exclusivity on international air travel. Hughes contracts two projects with the Army Air Forces in the mid-1940s, one for a spy aircraft.
The flying sequences are the film’s cleanest argument. Hughes in the cockpit is competent, decisive, and calm. Hughes on the ground is none of those things. The Aviator does not treat the sky as an escape. It treats it as the one place his mind works at full speed.
| Element | Detail from the film |
|---|---|
| Director | Martin Scorsese |
| Writer | John Logan |
| Runtime | 170 minutes |
| Lead | Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes |
| Hughes’s first hit | Hell’s Angels, converted to sound after The Jazz Singer |
| 1935 flight | H-1 Racer, new speed record, crash-landing in a beet field |
| 1938 flight | Around the world in four days |
| Rival | Juan Trippe of Pan Am, played by Alec Baldwin |
| Political threat | Senator Ralph Owen Brewster and the Community Airline Bill |
What the Awards Got Right
The Aviator received a leading 11 nominations at the 77th Academy Awards. They included Best Picture, Best Director for Scorsese, Best Actor for DiCaprio, and Best Supporting Actor for Alda. It won a leading 5 awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Blanchett.
At the 58th British Academy Film Awards, it received a leading 14 nominations. It won a leading 4 awards, including Best Film and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Blanchett. It received 6 nominations at the 62nd Golden Globe Awards.
The Blanchett win is the one that holds up. Her Hepburn is not an impression. She plays a woman who can see exactly what is wrong with Hughes and chooses him anyway, for a while. The film’s best scenes are the two of them in a house, with no planes anywhere.
DiCaprio has the harder job. He has to age from a cocky young director into a man who cannot touch a doorknob, and he does it without asking for sympathy. The Aviator never lets him off the hook. His charm and his illness come from the same place.
Where the 170 Minutes Go
The Aviator is too long. The middle stretch, where the business empire and the political fight take over, loses the thread of the man. Baldwin and Alda are good, but the Community Airline Bill is a procedural detour in a film that is otherwise about a body and a mind coming apart.
Scorsese also stacks the deck. The film wants Hughes to be a visionary punished by small men, and it mostly gets away with it. But the source material does not let us forget that he was also a man who pursued a 15-year-old girl. The Aviator mentions it and moves on fast. That is a choice, and it is the film’s weakest one.
Still, the ending lands. Hughes repeats the word “quarantine,” the same word his mother taught him in a Houston bathroom in 1913. The circle closes. The disease was there before the fame, and it outlasts it.
The Aviator is a big, confident, imperfect film about a man who could not stop building. It is worth its runtime for the flying and for Blanchett. It is worth arguing with for everything else.
Score: 7.7 of 10.
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