"The Aviator"

Hughes' problems and eccentricities are part of his myth, and while the movie strokes them a bit fetishistically, it also makes Hughes seem normal enough that we sympathize with him rather than shrink from him. So even though we watch in disbelief as Hughes frets over costly details while making the World War I dogfighter drama "Hell's Angels" (he shot 2.5 million feet of film, at a cost of $3.8 million, and three pilots died during filming), we can't help marveling at the way he captures the planes flying in perfect formation, the way they dip and dive toward the camera. How could a crazy person make something so beautiful? Then the argument inverts itself: How could you make something so beautiful and not be crazy?

Hughes was a movie producer and director, a wildly successful industrialist, a remote and confused boyfriend to the likes of Kate Hepburn (Cate Blanchett, in a cheerfully stylized performance) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale, who's possibly less believable than Blanchett is, but nearly as enjoyable to watch). But the movie wouldn't be called "The Aviator" if Hughes didn't love airplanes, and flying, most of all. The picture makes several gentle, winking nudges at Hughes' fixation on breasts (he made a whole movie, "The Outlaw," around Jane Russell's knockers, which piqued Hollywood censors), but his feelings about planes and flying have an erotic charge, too. In one sequence, he examines the body of a new airplane, skimming his hand along its shiny surface, feeling his way along the rivets, like hundreds of miniature erect nipples, that hold it together.

During this part of his life, Hughes owned most of an airline (TWA), was busy guiding his company, Hughes Aircraft, in building ambitious experimental airplanes and, once in a while, made a movie or two. But "The Aviator" suggests that his truest form of escape was flying. In an early scene, just as he's beginning to woo Hepburn, he brings her up in his plane for a nighttime swoop around Hollywood. City lights glitter and wink below them (the music, perfect for the moment, is that night light of a ballad, "Moonglow"). Hughes, immensely attracted to and frightened by this self-assured, leggy creature in the cockpit next to him -- he's shown her how to work the controls, a symbolic ceding of sexual power if there ever was one -- takes a chance: Though he's neurotically germ-phobic, he offers her a swig from the bottle of milk he's just opened for himself and, after she hands it back, he pauses and takes a brave gulp himself. Hughes likes girls well enough, but he likes breaking aircraft speed records better. And even though he nearly dies in a fiery crash in 1946, while testing an experimental reconnaissance plane, it's not long before he's airborne again. The air is the only place Hughes feels truly free; it's the ground that terrifies him.

Scorsese is a teller of tall tales, and wide ones, too: His 2002 "Gangs of New York" was too wide, a fatty-fatty-2-by-4 of the imagination -- its scale was impressive, so impressive that it dwarfed the storyteller, and the story. "The Aviator" is a completely different type of movie, and it seems to have freed up something in Scorsese. It's stylish and fleet, and even though it's meticulously detailed, Scorsese's devotion to technique never weighs it down. The flying sequences were pulled off using a mix of low- and high-tech means -- miniatures are set against digital backgrounds, for example. Scorsese wanted the movie to have the lushness of the old two- and three-strip Technicolor processes, an effect achieved using digital filters. The result is a picture whose colors have a vivid softness. The movie's costumes, by the always astute Sandy Powell, look more like movie clothes than street clothes, which is precisely the point. Hughes' late '20s bespoke windowpane-plaid suits, the flowing trousers and softly sporty blouses worn by Hepburn, the candy-rainbow Vargas Girl platform shoes seen on Hughes' underage "discovery" Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner): These are clothes that speak movie language unapologetically -- they stand up to the camera with their bold colors and shapes, but not so much that they distract us from the characters who wear them.

Next page: "We're not like anyone else -- too many acute angles, eccentricities"