The Hindu Business Line : Living the life of Howard Hughes

WHOEVER said that genius is nothing but focus, got it absolutely right. Unsaid was that utter focus on one makes a shamble of all else, rendering many a talented person misunderstood in the present and explicable only in retrospect.

The Aviator is an inter-play of such forces. It tells the story of one man's love for aviation amidst the ruins caused by that pursuit, through a film amazingly in one piece despite a formidable line-up of talent, from director Martin Scorsese, to Leonardo DiCaprio, now clearly a serious actor in his own right.

DiCaprio stars as Howard Hughes, who in the late 1920s, when barely out of his teens, decided to use the fortune inherited from his father's drill bit company to film a World War I dogfight-themed epic, Hell's Angels. Aviator covers Hughes' life over the next two decades into the late 1940s, when his airline, TWA, emerged as a major international player.

According to the official statement, "The Aviator explores not only the achievements but the emotional life of Howard Hughes including his love affairs with two Hollywood legends, Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale); as well as Hughes' fierce competition with Pan American's visionary head Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin); his life-long relationship with his right-hand man Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly); his public battles with Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) and the devastating airplane crash and phobias that led him to ultimately withdraw from the world."

There are moments when the film's pace slackens or you are left begging for insight into the origins of Hughes' fears. But none of that dampens the overall impact of narration, it maintains a steady clip, DiCaprio ably complemented by Blanchett in the first half and engaged in an ego battle by Alda in the second.

For DiCaprio himself, the role of Howard Hughes will probably go down as a landmark in his career. He grows with the character, at times revels in it with that boyish voice alone as chink in this celluloid portrayal of a maverick millionaire. But then, few of us knew Hughes, leave alone his voice!

Finally, don't be misled by the film's title. The Aviator has shots of planes flying and crashing and dialogues laced with aviation jargon. But it is more about an eccentric man imbued with a vision, how it blurred the line between right and wrong, the people who gathered around him and their flight through a world made turbulent by his vision.

The chaos facing Hughes can be summed up in the question posed by Dietrich, as their project to make the world's biggest plane erodes funds for TWA - "You want to be bankrupted by the big plane or the big airline ?"

It takes a certain madness to both spawn such a situation and evolve an answer. Which is what `The Aviator' is all about, starting with Hughes' search for two more cameras because the 24 he already had for filming a dogfight, were not enough.

The film releases here on Friday.

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Living the life of Howard Hughes

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