"The Aviator"

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#the.aviator

The Aviator, in contrast, is a blast. Having been embarrassed a couple of years ago when his leaden Leonardo DiCaprio drama Gangs of New York got deservedly blown away at the box-office by Steven Spielberg's simultaneously-released Leonardo DiCaprio soufflé Catch Me If You Can, Martin Scorsese is back with a fun biopic about Howard Hughes' golden years before his madness won out over his energy. DiCaprio is too young-looking to play Hughes, but he's a wonderful light leading man. And there's an admirable pro-free enterprise moral to the final story about Hughes' fight after WWII, as owner of the upstart airline TWA, to keep Congress from granting a monopoly on overseas flights to the established Pan-Am. Through sheer will he fights off his growing insanity long enough to rouse the public to prevent the special interests from nationalizing trans-Atlantic routes.

The Aviator features excellent casting of liberal icons Alan Alda and Alec Baldwin as the sleaze dog villains they were born to play. And the luncheon party scene where Kate Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) takes her boyfriend Howard home to the Hepburn's mansion on Long Island Sound to meet her insufferable family of snobbish socialists is a comic delight.

If Scorsese had ended the movie with the triumphant scene where Howard gets his colossal Spruce Goose white elephant seaplane airborne (albeit briefly) in 1947, The Aviator would be packing them in at the box-office, but he tacks on a five-minute downer of a coda reminding us of Howard's enclosing madness.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com