A Mirror Floating in Water

dir. Martin Scorsese 2004

The Aviator - Of Scorsese's big bidget collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio in the past ten years, this one in my opinion is his best. This is a truly masterful biographical film about the great Howard Hughes, with DiCaprio in probably the greatest performance of his career, who was a filmmaker, an industrialist, a playboy, and most importantly an aviator. He was also a troubled man, who's compulsions and phobias got in the way of his genius, and eventually led to his demise. He was an uncompromising man whose physical stature and appearence at times recalls Charles Foster Kane.

There is something special in the look and feel of the film. Mabye it's just a part of my obsession with the 20s' but Scorsese knows exactly what pitch the film should be at, at all times. As in so many of his films, every shot, every cut and every movement onscreen adheres to a rhythm, a musicality. Film critic Pauline Kael once commented that Mean Streets acts more like a musical than a gangster movie, not because it is a musical (because it isn't) but because scenes are shaped around a classics ranging from 70s' pop to opera. The same applies here in an intellegently well-chosen soundtrack displaying the most memorable jazz tracks from its Golden Age. Nobody knows how to use music in a film better then Scorsese, especially pop music. Ever since the bursting explosion of the opening song in Mean Streets, to the wide pop soundtrack in Goodfellas, Scorsese has always mastered a sense of time in place through the soundtrack.

Cate Blanchett has a fun little performance as Katherin Hepern (Hughes's short-time girlfriend), which can be easily underappretiated, due to the fact that Blanchett pulls it off without looking like a muttering fool. As in Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and a ton of his other films, Scorsese masters a sense of subjectivity within the audiences mind in relation to the character, in which we are seeing the paraniod illusions that Hughes is tormented by. There are times in which Hughes gets lost in words and other times in which his compulsions even prevent him from leaving the bathroom. Big and epic though this film may be, it has complete and total focus on Hughes and everyone, the camera, DiCapero the supporting cast are all inhibiting the world created by this great fallen man.