The Aviator
Flying Lumberyard
I was watching The Aviator when it came to me, the great idea, the same way that the idea for Jane Russell’s bra came to Howard Hughes. This is what we need.
Basically, when you got to a movie, you would be given (if you wanted) a small reciever and a set of headphones. It would work something like the self-guided tours they do at museums, or the experimental audio-description systems that describe movies for people who are blind. Except that the recording would contain basic information about the movie and the actors and whatnot.
So we have an early scene in the movie, with Howard Hughes discussing the financing of his movie, Hell’s Angels, with financial adviser Noah Dietrich. Everybody who didn’t have the reciever would be able to see the movie normally. But if you had the reciever, it would explain things to you. “The character of Howard Hughes is played by Leonardo DiCaprio,” it would say. “He won an Oscar nomination for his performance, his third, but Jamie Foxx beat him. He was in Titanic, too. The other guy is John C. Reilly. He’s in a lot of movies. He was Chest Rockwell in Boogie Nights, and sang “Mr. Cellophane” in Chicago.
You see how this works. Normally, if you were in the movie, and you wanted this basic information — “Who is that?” “What else has he been in?” “Is that the guy who was in the first scene?” — how could you get it? Answer: you would have to ask the person next to you. Well, we don’t want that, now, do we? Do we? We emphatically do not. Providing additional information about the movie through a wireless connection for people who are just too dim to watch movies otherwise would go a long way to cut down on that scourge, talking in the movies.
I am saying this not because there were two women sitting behind us when we were watching The Aviator, and they spent the whole movie explaining things to each other. Kate Beckinsale would show up on the screen, and they would have to explain to each other who she was, and what she had been in, and that she was playing Ava Gardner, and then she would go away, and come back twenty minutes later, and then these same two people would have the same exact conversation. It got so you wished a plane would drop on Beckinsale’s character, just to interrupt the conversational flow.
But The Aviator is just that kind of movie. It’s the sort of movie that demands footnotes, or Cliffs Notes, or something. It’s a slice of about twenty years of American history, served up with a disquisition on untreated Obsessive Compulsive Disorder plus the effects of massive milk consumption. It’s a big movie, with big ideas, suited for the big screen, and there are just going to be people who aren’t going to be able to keep up. (If we can’t get a wireless no-chatter system, can we institute a nationwide screening process where you have to have a certain IQ to get into the movies? Or would that bring down the weekend numbers for Vin Diesel movies too far?
DiCaprio is Hughes, and it’s a tough character to play because we know so much about Hughes. You could do a Howard Hughes autobiographical haiku easy enough:
Slept with Kate Hepburn
Flew the Spruce Goose, then his shoes
Were Kleenex boxes
The Aviator doesn’t get quite that far along, but it gets close enough, and that’s probably as close as we want anyway. It starts off with the epic three-year filming of Hell’s Angels, then meanders into Hughes’s relationships with starlets, then wanders into airplane design and construction, then plows through the swamps of the TWA-PanAm rivalry, then starts the same dreary circuit all over again, until Hughes’s manias take hold and the movie starts its long (oh, so, so long) spiral into madness.
There’s a lot that could have been done here that wasn’t to shorten the story a bit, to tighten it up. One could have made the villains less cardboard, for one thing. (That would be Alec Baldwin, looking remarkably beefy in middle age, and Alan Alda, auditioning for The West Wing.) But genius director Martin Scorsese is clearly more interested in the cinematography than the story, just as he was in Gangs of New York. And — at this point — I don’t really feel up to the challenge of criticizing Scorsese. This is a brilliant work. Even given his little quirky film-school touches that result in blue peas on DiCaprio’s plate (the result of some old-school Technicolor process), it’s a remarkable achievement in the lively art of filmmaking.
Having said that, what Scorsese has created here — overlarge, lumbering, retro-design and all that — is remarkably similar to Howard Hughes’s own Spruce Goose. Widely derided as a flying lumberyard, it was not appreciated in its own time for what it was. As a society, we are quite a bit dumber now than we once were, or so it seems, and much less able to tell greatness in a movie — or to even appreciate one without audio Cliffs Notes, apparently. The Aviator is wasted on its audience.