Scorsese’s Howard Hughes film is big, fast and beautifully dressed, with a Cate Blanchett who steals every scene she is in. It explains its subject in one childhood scene and then keeps pointing at it, and at 170 minutes the last hour drags.
Martin Scorsese and the writer John Logan take Howard Hughes from the shooting of Hell’s Angels in the late 1920s and stop well short of the bearded recluse of legend. Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) has his father’s tool company in Houston to pay for whatever he wants, and what he wants, in order, is a war film with real aeroplanes, the fastest plane in the world, an airline and Katharine Hepburn. The film says the appetite that built the planes is the one that left him unable to touch a door handle. It is a good film, worth an evening, and not the great one people hoped for from this director. At 170 minutes it is about an hour longer than its best material.
The first stretch is the best. Hughes has spent a fortune on his dogfight picture, is waiting for clouds, and has hired a meteorologist, Professor Fitz (Ian Holm), to find him some. John C. Reilly, as the accountant Noah Dietrich, walks a pace behind with the face of a man who has already read the bank statements. Thelma Schoonmaker cuts the aerial footage and Hughes’s pacing together so that the money and the mania look like the same thing.
Then Cate Blanchett arrives as Hepburn, on a golf course, talking faster than Hughes can think, and the film goes up a gear. She has the voice and the stride, but what makes it a performance rather than an impression is that she lets us see the work: Hepburn keeping up with being Hepburn. Lunch with her family in Connecticut, where everyone talks over everyone about politics and nobody will admit to caring about money, is the funniest scene in the film. We laughed, then noticed Hughes was not laughing.
Robert Richardson shoots the first hour in the colours of early Technicolor, so greens come out blue: the golf course, the peas on Hughes’s plate. Later the full palette arrives and the reds get louder. Dante Ferretti builds the Cocoanut Grove with paper palms and a dance floor big enough to land on, and Sandy Powell puts Hepburn in trousers and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) in the strongest colour in any room she enters. Howard Shore keeps his own music low and lets the bands carry the nightclubs. None of it is only decoration: Hughes lines those peas up by size, and stops eating when Errol Flynn (Jude Law) takes one off his plate.
The moment we will keep is in a men’s lavatory. Hughes has washed his hands until they bleed, and he cannot touch the door handle, so he stands and waits for someone else to come in and open it. DiCaprio does almost nothing, and we were more frightened by that door than by anything the film puts in the air, because we understood, as he did, that he would rather stay in there all night than touch it. The flying sequences are there so this scene can land: the man who can fly anything, beaten by a brass knob.
DiCaprio is good as the young Hughes, all appetite and impatience. He is less good later, when the film gives him a moustache and a lower voice and his face declines to go along with it. He plays a man of forty like a boy who has been told to, and the film needs that older Hughes to carry weight.
The larger problem is Logan’s script. It opens with Hughes’s mother washing him and spelling out “quarantine”, and it treats that scene as a receipt for everything after: each tic has a cause, each cause gets a flashback. Once Hughes leaves the aeroplanes for boardrooms and committee rooms, opposite Alec Baldwin’s Juan Trippe and Alan Alda’s Senator Brewster, the film slows to the pace of a hearing, and we felt every remaining minute. Baldwin and Alda are fine. Their scenes are about airline routes.
Scorsese has made a better film about a man taking himself apart, in black and white, and he was not fond of Jake LaMotta the way he is fond of Hughes. Fondness makes him generous with time. Watch this on the largest screen you have, in one sitting, and expect the first two hours to be better than the third. The 12A is honest; the length is the only thing in it a child would struggle with.
