Hollywood Stories: Watching The Aviator

January 28, 2007

Hollywood has no apparent interest in reality.. by which I mean the world as it is actually experienced by human beings. The Aviator struck me as such a highly stylized version of the world that it became simply a procession of movie moments. Hollywood movies have always existed a step or two away from the real world.. and I guess my favorite films (Chinatown, Bringing Up Baby) do not exactly hew to any line of realism.. but those films stand a more comfortably within the confines of a genre. The Aviator, on the other hand, is an a little more self-consciously a serious film.. with pretensions to grandness.

Citizen Kane was clearly in the mind of Scorsese, with his film's Kane-like fadeouts, the flashbacks to an explanatory youth, and the obvious similarity of a film based on the life of a monumentally rich self-made American. Where Citizen Kane offered us finally the great opaque mystery of a human being, The Aviator gives us an over-determined portrait of a man suffering from germ phobia. Citizen Kane fills one with hope that cinema can richly explore human experience, even if within stylized parameters, while The Aviator sends that hope crashing to the ground.

The portrayal of Katharine Hepburn riled me up.. which may be inevitable after having completed such a thorough biography (by William Mann). Cate Blanchett won the Oscar for best supporting actress for this performance. If one is looking for mimicry of the Hepburn screen persona, then she is indeed superb. But this film was ostensibly about Hepburn as a person.. and so it seems a shame to settle for a cutout version of her. I understand that filmmakers need to simplify events in order to get a film on the screen.. but this should hardly license the creation of epic romances at every possible opportunity.

I guess this is why I have chosen to review this film on the blog.. I want to register the fact that we are being short-changed. I do not believe that contemporary movies from Hollywood are able to portray our world in a convincing way. The Departed and Blood Diamond are two more ambitious and serious Hollywood films which have no anchor set in reality.. and neither have an interest in depicting human beings and their odd relationships in a realistic fashion.. not to mention our unstylized and trivial everyday reality.