The Aviator

Martin Scorsese often complains about the limitations of genre, but as I look over his filmography, I’m struck at the number of his movies that could be classified as one genre or another. He has a number of gangster movies, all very different, two religious epics, two sports pictures (my local video store inexplicably puts The Color of Money in “Action”), a couple of costume dramas (I count Gangs of New York as a gangster costume drama, although it’s closer to a historical epic in structure), a thriller, a comedy, and now a Hollywood Biopic.

I mentioned watching The Aviator to a female friend of mine today and she said “Is that the one about the guy who, you know, follows his dream?” And it occurred to me that, well, all Hollywood Biopics are about a Guy who Follows His Dream. I mean, honestly, who would spend $100 million on a 3-hour movie about a guy who doesn’t follow his dreams? Usually, now that I think of it, the guy Follows His Dream but it brings him nothing but grief, and he often dies before his time.

Howard Hughes, of course, didn’t die before his time, but he did the next best thing in biopic terms, which was to have a Bizarre Medical Condition.

TE Lawrence was obsessed with the desert, Gandhi wanted to free India from imperialism, Schindler wanted to save them Jews, and Howard Hughes, according to The Aviator, was obsessed with building airplanes.

Scorsese’s Howard Hughes is obsessed with his airplanes, so we also become obsessed with his airplanes. He cares about the rivets, so we care about the rivets. He gets excited climbing into the cockpit to test a new plane, so we do too. And when he starts falling apart, we feel bad for him, we feel that something has been tragically lost. Scorsese has made the story of one of the 20th century’s most peculiar men into something oddly universal. How did he do that?

I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that only Martin Scorsese could make a movie about a billionaire industrialist playboy and have him come off as a shy, awkward, hard-working, underappreciated outsider.

How did he do that? I would say that he did that by strongly identifying with his protagonist. But how does one identify with Howard Hughes?

Well, I have a little meaningless pocket guide that served as my way through the movie.

Howard Hughes loves planes. Martin Scorsese loves film. (This link is underscored in the first half-hour of the film, where Hughes is shown actually making a movie about planes, in fact actually making a movie in a plane.)
Scorsese presents Hughes as an outsider because that’s what he makes movies about. His movies about societies are always about the outsider who can’t quite make it inside that society, who’s always on the edge, looking in the window, not quite able to understand the way things are done. Even his gangster movies have outsider protagonists; Henry Hill in Goodfellas is Irish, Ace in Casino is Jewish. My dimestore-psychology theory is that Scorsese makes movies about outsiders because even though he was an Italian/American living in Little Italy, he was too small and too sickly to ever fit into that world; the outsider’s POV is the only way he understands things.

So Howard Hughes is presented not as a wealthy captain of industry, but as a misfit loner who bucks the system. He’s an outsider in Hollywood (even though his movies are hits and he’s dating every actress in town), an outsider in aviation (even though he owns a major airline and has expensive military contracts), and an outsider in the human condition (because of his mental problems).

Like Scorsese and his movies, Hughes sweats the details with his airplanes. He knows everything about the engineering of his planes and he knows everyone’s job better than they do. He wants the rivets flush because it will make a difference in the way the plane flies. He’s presented with ten different steering wheels and none of them are quite right.

Hughes Aircraft was a stunning success, but Scorsese only shows the failures. There are two scenes of Hughes actually crashing in his own planes. One is harmless and he walks away from it, the other is horrific and he is crippled for life. In real life, these crashes were mere hiccups in the production of those planes, but in the movie we never see either plane again, as if they never went into production.

I get the feeling that Scorsese is equating Hughes’s crashes with his own crashes. The H-1, for instance, is the plane that beat the air-speed record, but crashed in a beet field. That could be a metaphor for Raging Bull, a movie repeatedly voted as one of the 10 best of all time, yet unwatched in its first release. The XF-11, the crash that crippled Hughes, could be King of Comedy, the movie that put Scorsese in the directoral doghouse for a decade. The Spruce Goose, years in the making, the plane that Hughes finally flew to save his reputation (the flight serves as the climax of the movie) could be The Last Temptation of Christ, the movie Scorsese fought to make for years but finally got off the ground.

The OCD stuff, well, I was going to say that it’s analogous to Scorsese’s asthma, but that’s glib. I was also going to say that instead of OCD, Scorsese has his Catholic Guilt, but I don’t see Scorsese as being crippled by anything these days. Maybe it’s his work ethic, the way that his work kept him from having close relationships in the early part of his life (says the guy who just read a book of interviews with him).

Leonardo DiCaprio, who doesn’t seem to look much like Hughes, does a great job of getting across Hughes’s strengths, so when we see him be weak we feel it. Cate Blanchett utterly vanishes in her portrayal of Katherine Hepburn. Man, what a performance. You look at her and look at her, and you know it’s not Katherine Hepburn, in fact it doesn’t even look that much like Katherine Hepburn, but the fact is that, even in the most intimate scenes, you don’t see Cate Blanchette either. There is some kind of actress up there, playing the role of Katherine Hepburn.

I dare not think too much about what this means, but Scorsese’s Jesus shows up half-way through the movie as an oily, fish-faced scandal-monger.

The Color of Money

Long ago, in the mists of time, Some Guy came up with a thing called the “Auteur Theory” of film. The “author” of a film, he said, is the director, that the director cannot help but put a personal stamp on every film he or she makes, regardless of his or her personal connection to the material. This theory insists that, regardless of film being an incredibly collaborrative medium, the director is the sole author of the finished artifact.

This was a radical theory for its time, at least in America. According to Hollywood, the author of a film is whoever found the money to finance the production. That’s why the Oscar for Best Picture usually goes to someone you’ve never heard of.

The Oscar goes to the producer because Hollywood was not built by Auteur Theorists, or even Auteurs. It was built by Show People out to make a buck. The Studio made a movie, not Some Director. The Studio created a brand, beat filmable scripts out of ink-stained wretches, assigned stars to be in them and directors to shoot them. The director is the “author” of a film? That would have certainly been news to Irving Thalberg, to Louis B. Mayer, to freaking David O. Selznik.

Now then:

The Auteur Theory is very useful if your job is film analysis. But the marketplace has its own demands.

Why do people, let’s say Americans, go to see a movie? This is a question that is becoming more and more pertinent in today’s market, where tickets cost $11, popcorn and soda cost $10, gas costs $3, parking costs another $3, and who knows what else your date will ask for. What will induce Americans to leave their homes and go to a movie theater, when excellent entertainment awaits them in every corner of their homes on their computer screens, sattellite TVs, DVD players and X-Boxes?

One answer to that is Spectacle. Give an audience something in the movie theater that they cannot see at home. Give them More. Big pictures, broad themes, lots of Stuff, sophisticated special effects, grandiose and complex action sequences, famous faces, big drama, emotional punch.

By this reasoning, Peter Jackson’s King Kong should have been the biggest hit in the history of time. But it wasn’t. Why not?

Well, I think the Auteur Theory has finally caught up with mainstream American audiences. I think that what people want, increasingly, from a film is a personal vision, an authorial voice, if you will. I think that as films become less and less about “going out to the movies” and more like Something You Own, like a book, people will gravitate more towards filmmakers of strong personal vision and will become less interested in Studio Programmers, movies that are made to fill a production pipeline, not because anybody actually feels passion about any of them. I go into people’s houses (I’m not a burglar, they invite me) and what I see are things like an entire shelf of films by Tim Burton or David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick.

There was a great story in The Onion a few years ago, the thrust of which was that a potential girlfriend turned into a one-night stand after she woke up in a guy’s house in the morning and saw his DVD collection. The joke was not that his collection consisted of animal torture videos or anything; the joke was that his collection consisted solely of movies like Joe Somebody and Hart’s War and The 6th Day, corporate place-fillers with no theme or personal point of view. The girl in question says “I mean, I can’t believe I actually went to bed with someone who one day walked into a video store and said “Hello, I’d like to purchase a copy of The Legend of Bagger Vance.”

Point is, the Movie Business is rapidly becoming the DVD Business. And if you Buy a movie the way an earlier generation Bought books, movies by voices you love, trust and admire, voices that intrigue, seduce and enthrall you will be the movies you buy.

Anyway, enough of that.

The Color of Money is one of Martin Scorsese’s least personal, least discussed and most underrated movies. At the time it came out, I didn’t even see it in the theater because it had the whiff of “a job” about it. When I first saw it on video, probably in 1991, it still didn’t do that much for me because it wasn’t very clearly “about” Scorsese, who very much interests me as an Auteur. It seemed very much a Star Vehicle for Paul Newman. You can tell when a movie is a Star Vehicle when a supporting role is played by the hottest movie star in the world, in this case the young Tom Cruise, who had just come off Top Gun.

One of the pleasures of the movie is watching Cruise, easily the most intensely focused, controlled actor alive, play someone who is out of control, unfocused and green. Usually in the Tom Cruise Movie, Tom plays the Cocky Young _____ Who Takes A Fall and Becomes a Better _____. In this movie, he’s a pool hustler, so he plays a Cocky Young Pool Hustler, but because he’s in a supporting role, we miss the scene where he Takes A Fall and move on to the part where he Becomes A Better Pool Hustler, but it turns out, in the end, that That Isn’t Good Enough. Because, well, because it’s Not His Movie.

The DVD of The Color of Money, I’d like to note, has a substantially better transfer than my old DVD of Goodfellas. I know Goodfellas has been remastered recently, but I cannot otherwise account for this discrepancy.

The Color of Money deals with Pool Sharks, which are a type of con man, which automatically puts this movie into Mamet-land, bars and pool halls and hotel rooms, where men “play” each other and everyone has a hidden agenda. And there are a number of reveals and reversals in the movie that are certainly worthy of Mamet. But the script, by Richard Price, has a depth and subtlety of character that Mamet’s screenplays don’t really seem interested in, along with a corresponding charity toward both his characters and his audience. Mamet often seems mainly interested in tricking the audience; he’s more witholding, colder, more cynical. (The comparison isn’t that unfair. Both Mamet and Price wrote excellent comeback vehicles for Paul Newman [Mamet was nominated for an Oscar for The Verdict.] For some reason, I believe Richard Price’s climactic scene of redemption and Mamet’s seems forced to me.)

The power struggle between Newman and Cruise (and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is palpable and engaging without ever being underlined and overstated. The thrust of Newman’s character arc is that he goes from saying that excellence is good for taking people’s money from them to saying that excellence has a value in and of itself. In Mamet’s version, it would turn out that Newman, we learn, was playing Cruise all along, or vice versa, whichever would make us feel more cynical. Well, that’s life.

On a technical end, I don’t know if anyone has counted, but a good alternate title for the picture could be 101 Exciting Ways to Shoot a Billiard Ball.

A young man named Forrest Whittaker shows up as a rival hustler, and Bill Cobbs will meet up with Newman in a few years, playing the Magical Negro in The Hudsucker Proxy.

SPOILER ALERT: The Color of Money, we finally learn in a surprise twist, is “green.”

The Last Temptation of Christ

By total coincidence, my Palm Sunday choice of entertainment is Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film of The Last Temptation of Christ.

I was in the audience opening night at the Ziegfeld in New York. To get into the theater, you had to walk past Christian fundamentalist protestors, waving signs and shouting epithets.

The movie, back then, seemed heartfelt but a little weird. It was weird to be a Downtown New York hipster and see Willem Dafoe playing Jesus. It was weird to hear Judas talk with a tough-guy Brooklyn accent behind his big putty nose, see fellow Downtown hipster John Lurie play an apostle, see Harry Dean Stanton play Paul. It was weird to see Mary Magdelene naked, having sex, it was weird to hear stories you’ve memorized in Jacobean English be translated into contemporary American English. It seemed a little arch, a little self-conscious, a little too 80s. It seemed a little long, a little confusing, occasionally obvious, occasionally very very strange.

Repeated viewings takes all the weirdness away, turns them into mere stylistic choices. Bold choices, but secondary to the script and the story, as it should be, as it must be. Now the movie seems like a very important, deeply moving human drama about the divine in all of us. In fact, I’ll go further than that; if this movie had been around when I was a kid, I might actually believe in the story of Jesus now. Scorsese’s Jesus is approachable, human, confused, upset, doubtful and given to temptation. Hey, that’s me! But, “Owl Creek Bridge”-like, he wakes up from his dream and presses on, knows that the divine is possible when you realize that life isn’t the most important thing in the world.

I am also struck by the similarities between Jesus and another Willem Dafoe character, Norman Osborne.

Both characters hear voices. Jesus hears God, Norman hears the Green Goblin.
Both come with signiture identifying props. Jesus has a cross and nails, Norman has a glider and hand grenades.
Jesus is a simple carpenter who becomes a powerful savior, Norman is a simple arms manufacturer who becomes a powerful villain.
Jesus is betrayed by Judas and killed by the Romans, Norman is betrayed by the board of Oscorp and is killed by Spider-Man.
Both Jesus and Norman are scorned and mocked as crazy people.
Both Jesus and Norman are buff and ripped.
Both of their stories were written by great Jewish writers.
Norman is tempted by a mask, Jesus is tempted by Satan, who wears many masks.
Jesus has a scene with David Bowie, Norman has a scene with Macy Gray.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.