Howard Hughes life in the movie might have seemed perfect giving his level of success and fame to the world but inside he's a total wreck battling depression almost leading to madness.
Despite a pacy, technically brilliant but otherwise slightly ordinary first half-hour or so, Scorsese's Howard Hughes movie is his best since The Age of Innocence.
This almost-great epic has one foot in legend: it's a vision of an American titan that could have sprung from the insides of Hughes's own obsessive, perfectionist head.
This undoubtedly is the movie Scorsese set out to make, and he made it exceedingly well. Still, we can fault him for choosing to celebrate its subject instead of examining him.
Sacramento News & Review
August 07, 2008
It's all rather sprawling and a bit disjointed, but Scorsese's vigorous pacing and eye for detail hold it all together and provide a vivid setting for DiCaprio's masterful performance (his best work yet).
It's a measure of The Aviator's complexity and ambiguity that it can be read equally as a celebration of rugged, capitalist individualism and as a leftist critique of cutthroat free-market competition.
Its primary appeal is its speed: It rushes along, from scandal to air crash to movie romance to Senate hearing, each anecdote well realized but never tarried over.
