Forget The Beach and Titanic; Leo grows up as an actor in The Aviator

As the son of a C-46 air freight pilot and a former Avianca flight attendant, I've always had a love affair with aviation. Even though Dad died in a plane crash in 1965, I've never been afraid of planes; indeed, I've always looked forward to heading off on a sky-borne journey, whether it is a transatlantic flight to Spain or a transcontinental "hop" to keep a romantic date with someone I care for. Even after the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001 I still see an airborne trip as an exciting, even romantic adventure, so naturally I'm drawn to movies about planes and the people who design, build, maintain, and fly them.

When I heard that Martin Scorcese's The Aviator, a three-hour biography of billionaire Howard Hughes was going to star Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, The Beach), I was a bit skeptical, for although "Leo" is a good actor, I've always thought that he's just too youthful, too good-looking to pull off portraying the brilliant, enigmatic, and, sadly, mentally unstable Hughes, who parlays his father's oil-drilling equipment company's profits into a simultaneous leap into film-making, designing and flying aircraft, and transforming an upstart and nearly bankrupt airline (TWA) into a scrappy contender that dares to challenge the powerful Pan American World Airways and its ruthless owner, Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin).

After seeing The Aviator in a nearly-empty theater recently, however, I found my skepticism melting away as I watched DiCaprio immersing himself into a role that will make willing audiences forget -- at least for a while -- his portrayal of Jack Dawson in 1997's Titanic.

The Aviator's narrative covers a 20-year period in Hughes' fascinating life. After a brief and enigmatic prologue that shows a very young Howard being bathed by his beautiful mother, the film literally takes off as the maverick millionaire begins production of his groundbreaking World War I film, Hell's Angels, which not only used a small air force's worth of real Allied and German fighters from that conflict, but was also Hughes' first of many grand obsessions. Most of the first act of The Aviator focuses on the three years Hughes and his crew spent on filming Hell's Angels and on the young producer's mania for detail and breaking new ground. Watching Hughes attempting to beg, borrow, or steal two more cameras, for instance, gives audiences a taste of both Hughes' drive and the mental illnesses that would eventually drive him into self-isolation and a lonely death in a Las Vegas hotel suite in 1976. The Aviator doesn't follow Hughes all the way to that sad and weird finale, but it does foreshadow it, especially in the second and third acts; we see how he blanches at the thought of germs and contagious diseases, and we witness how his mental state quickly deteriorates after a spy plane he is test-piloting crashes, nearly killing him.

The Aviator also gives us glimpses of Hughes' tempestuous romances with two legendary actresses, Katharine Hepburn (played impeccably by Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Pearl Harbor Beckinsale). Though neither one could cope with Hughes' wandering eyes and his paranoia (he has, for instance, Ava's room, car, and even the telephone bugged), it's quite clear that the young millionaire did, in his own way, love them; when a scandal sheet reporter (Willem Dafoe) gets his hand on photos showing Hepburn with her married -- and Catholic -- lover Spencer Tracy, Hughes gallantly intervenes.

Although The Aviator has at least three major plot lines dealing with Hughes' conflicts with Hollywood censors over Jane Russell's mammaries in The Outlaw, his struggle to build a huge troop-carrying seaplane which he dubbed the Hercules (but is better known by the moniker The Spruce Goose), and his titanic struggle with Pan Am's Trippe and his Senatorial lapdog Ralph Oren Brewster of Maine (Alan Alda), it is so engrossing and well-written (by John Logan) that the three-hour running time literally flew by. Scorsese is a masterful director and gets wonderful performances from DiCaprio, Blanchett, Beckinsale, Baldwin, and Alda. His sense of pacing is unerring, and the flight sequences, including several CGI shots of the Spruce Goose and other experimental Hughes aircraft, are truly outstanding.