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The Aviator Movie Review

The Aviator is a 2004 biographical drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s definitely a flawed, but mostly satisfying biopic.

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“You don’t care about money because you’ve always had it“

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After Howard Hughes’ film becomes a success, he pursues the growing aviation industry. However, a mental health illness threatens his aspirations. This biopic follows Hughes’ life from the late 1920s to the mid 1940s, focusing only on the major feats and issues that he faced. I am fine with this approach, but because the first half is full of triumph and Hollywood excess and the second is completely opposite – psychologically tortured and tragic – the movie ended up feeling structurally disparate in these two halves being tonally entirely different.

I personally prefer the first half. This is where we get to see Hollywood in its full glory as well as danger. In its emphasis on romanticization and ambition of this time period and its many excesses the film felt highly similar to Damien Chazelle’s ‘Babylon’. This section worked so well due to its impressive technical aspects. The costumes are gorgeous and the same goes for make-up. How the actors and actresses looked fitted the time period portrayed deftly. The score, sound and cinematography are all quite good too while the editing is excellent and the production design quite mesmerizing.

This is the most opulent Scorsese movie and a rare film where I couldn’t really see his usual style and obsessions. I can only think of ‘The Age of Innocence’ as another case where his usual touches (the themes of crime and religion) are absent. This made the movie fresh, but what made it far from exciting is its rather standard biopic formula and an overlong runtime. I was still engaged watching it as the dialogue is strong and the characterization surprisingly good, but still there was no need for this story to be three hours long.

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The Aviator features a tremendous cast. Every single actor here was chosen for their roles impeccably well. I liked DiCaprio’s turn here quite a bit, though I wasn’t fully impressed. He didn’t fully make Howard Hughes come to life, but he did play out his obsessive personality quirks very well. Alan Alda was nominated for his very small supporting turn, but he wasn’t particularly memorable. John C. Reilly, Kate Beckinsale, Ian Holm and Alec Baldwin were all so well cast and every one of them delivered.

But there is only one standout here and one that was honored with an Oscar fittingly enough and that is Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn. This was a risky choice to play such an iconic figure in Hollywood history, but Blanchett fitted the role like a glove with her over-the-top theatrics and a propensity to make every line of dialogue sound fun and important. I loved her in this movie and I wanted more of her. Whenever the film focused on her character, it truly came to life.

So yes, I loved The Aviator’s romantic and flying scenes. I loved those inside Hollywood scenes – there is this very amusing sequence that depicts how the Hays Code worked for instance. But the psychological elements were only solidly explored and this is where Scorsese struggled to explore this man’s mental issues more in-depth. I wanted more of a psychological thriller tone in the second half and that would have made this section much more involving.

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