Flying without wings

REVIEWED: THE AVIATOR Martin Scorsese's panoramic film about the young Howard Hughes is lacking an emotional core, writes Donald Clarke

Near the beginning of Martin Scorsese's opulent crawl through the early life of Howard Hughes, the hero, played with familiar callowness by Leonardo DiCaprio, finds himself swept away by Cate Blanchett's angular, barking Katharine Hepburn. They flirt at The Cocoanut Grove nightclub, they gabble their way through a game of golf and, later, offering us the first of several magical aerial views of Los Angeles, take a ride in an aeroplane. All this activity is filmed in a gorgeously bold approximation of early Technicolor, lending the events the quality of distant, fondly cherished memories.

At moments like this it is easy to believe that The Aviator is the stonking return to form we have been wishing on Scorsese for the last decade or so. And, yes, this film is certainly more coherent and more vital than the lumbering, poorly focused Gangs of New York.

But there is still something missing. Though the script touches on the obsessive-compulsive disorder that would later render Hughes a hairy recluse and we get some impression of the pressures that extreme fame and wealth can bring, there is little sense of foreboding or menace hanging about The Aviator. Here is a man facing demons at least as terrible as those that Jake LaMotta engaged with in Raging Bull, but the picture never even hints at the threatening ambience that used to be the director's trademark. With apologies to DiCaprio, whose stubbornly unshakeable adolescence lends Hughes an interesting energy, one can't help but imagine a hole the shape of a young Robert DeNiro at the centre of this enterprise.

The film begins with Hughes the movie director throwing insane amounts of his seemingly inexhaustible fortune at his spectacular first World War flying epic Hell's Angels and ends, a decade and a half later, with the brief flight of his famously huge and notoriously impractical aeroplane The Spruce Goose. Movies and planes were Hughes's main concern throughout the 1930s and Scorsese, as famously obsessed with the former as he apparently is wary of the latter, delivers any number of spectacular set-pieces involving film, flying or both. The première of Hell's Angels - during which the director's near-psychotic mania for flash-bulbs manifests itself yet again - excitingly recalls similar scenes from Singin' in the Rain and A Star is Born. The sequence where Hughes crash-lands a plane in Beverly Hills is satisfactorily unnerving and demonstrates Scorsese's confident embrace of digital effects.

It is all tremendously bracing and - Kate Beckinsale's utterly pathetic impersonation of Ava Gardner aside - well performed throughout. Indeed, were The Aviator directed by some 25-year-old tyro one might, after pointing out that at least half-an-hour's footage could have been comfortably left on the cutting-room floor, have identified the picture as evidence of startling promise. But coming from a director still occasionally identified as the greatest still living, The Aviator, despite its meticulous attention to detail and gorgeous palette, feels more than a little emotionally stunted.