The Aviator

The Aviator marked the second collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, following Gangs of New York, and it accomplished what that earlier film couldn’t quite manage. It gave DiCaprio a role that used his intensity productively, channeling it into a character whose internal extremes were the point rather than a limitation. The film traces Howard Hughes from his early twenties through his late forties, covering his careers as a filmmaker, aviation pioneer, and airline owner while tracking the obsessive-compulsive disorder that increasingly consumed his private life. It earned eleven Academy Award nominations and won five, establishing the Scorsese-DiCaprio partnership as one of the defining collaborations in modern American cinema.

Hughes is a figure who defies easy characterization. A Texas oil heir who poured his fortune into making the most expensive movie ever filmed, designing and flying experimental aircraft, and battling the established airline industry for the right to compete, he was simultaneously a visionary and a man whose mind was slowly betraying him. The film handles both sides with care, showing the genius and the illness as inseparable aspects of the same personality rather than treating one as the “real” Hughes and the other as an affliction layered on top.

DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes and the Cost of Brilliance

DiCaprio’s performance is the film’s foundation, and it’s the work that transformed how audiences and the industry saw him. His Hughes is electric in the early scenes, a young man with unlimited resources and unlimited confidence who bends Hollywood and the aviation industry to his will through sheer force of personality. DiCaprio plays the young Hughes with a Texan charm and a relentless forward momentum that make his early successes feel inevitable. You understand why people followed him, funded him, and tolerated behavior that would have ended anyone else’s career.

The performance’s real power emerges as the OCD symptoms intensify. DiCaprio portrays Hughes’s compulsions with a physicality that avoids caricature. The hand-washing, the repetitive phrases, the terror of contamination are played not as quirks but as a prison that closes tighter with each passing year. A sequence where Hughes locks himself in a screening room for months, naked and deteriorating, is among the bravest scenes DiCaprio has filmed. He doesn’t ask for sympathy. He shows the reality of a mind consuming itself and trusts the audience to respond.

Scorsese’s visual approach serves the story beautifully. The film’s first half is shot with a color palette designed to mimic two-strip Technicolor, giving the 1920s and 1930s sequences a warm, saturated look that evokes the era’s visual culture. The palette shifts to three-strip Technicolor for the 1940s sections, and the transition works both as period detail and as visual metaphor for the increasing complexity of Hughes’s world. The flight sequences are spectacular, combining practical effects and digital work to capture the romance and terror of early aviation. The crash of the XF-11 into a Beverly Hills neighborhood is a set piece of extraordinary technical achievement.

Cate Blanchett’s Katharine Hepburn won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the recognition was deserved. Blanchett captures Hepburn’s distinctive speech patterns and physical mannerisms without ever tipping into impersonation. She plays Hepburn as a woman whose own eccentricities make her uniquely equipped to understand Hughes, and the scenes between them crackle with the energy of two people who are too much alike to coexist comfortably. Their relationship is the film’s warmest stretch, and its dissolution is deeply affecting.

Where The Aviator Loses Altitude

The 170-minute runtime creates drag in the film’s middle section. The business dealings with Pan American Airways and the Senate hearings led by Owen Brewster are historically important to Hughes’s story but cinematically less compelling than the personal drama surrounding them. Alan Alda’s Brewster is effective as a political villain, but the Senate sequences feel like they belong in a different, more procedural film. These scenes slow the momentum between the aviation sequences and the personal deterioration that form the film’s most engaging material.

The supporting cast beyond Blanchett and Alda often feels underserved. Kate Beckinsale’s Ava Gardner arrives in the second half and brings poise to the role but isn’t given enough screen time to develop into more than a beautiful presence in Hughes’s life. The business associates and engineers who surround Hughes function primarily as audience surrogates, reacting to his behavior rather than operating as fully realized characters. In a film this long, the thinness of the supporting world becomes noticeable.

The film’s treatment of Hughes’s mental illness, while sensitive in its execution, raises questions about what it leaves out. The story ends in the late 1940s, before Hughes’s most extreme period of isolation and decline. This is a deliberate artistic choice that allows the film to end on a note of ambiguity rather than devastation, but it also means the movie tells only part of the story. Viewers familiar with Hughes’s later life may find the film’s relatively hopeful final beat inadequate to the full scope of his tragedy.

The Loneliest Man in Every Room

The Aviator’s central insight is that Hughes’s greatest achievements and his greatest suffering came from the same source: an inability to accept limitations. The same drive that made him reshoot aerial sequences dozens of times until they were perfect also made him wash his hands until they bled. The same refusal to accept that something couldn’t be done pushed him to build aircraft that experts said were impossible and locked him in bathrooms for days when the world proved too contaminated to face. Scorsese presents this not as irony but as tragedy in the classical sense, a man whose defining quality is both his gift and his destruction. The film’s most powerful moments are the ones where you can see both operating simultaneously, where Hughes’s brilliance and his illness occupy the same gesture, the same sentence, the same frame.

Should You Watch The Aviator?

If you’re interested in biographical filmmaking that takes visual risks and anchors itself in a commanding lead performance, this is one of the best examples of the 2000s. DiCaprio’s Hughes is a career-defining performance, and Scorsese’s recreation of mid-century Hollywood and the aviation industry is immersive and often breathtaking. The film also works as a thoughtful, unsensationalized portrait of mental illness that treats its subject with dignity.

Skip it if political intrigue and business dealings bore you, because the film dedicates significant time to both. The pacing requires patience, and viewers who come expecting wall-to-wall flight sequences will find more boardroom drama than cockpit action.

The Verdict on The Aviator

The Aviator is a gorgeous, sprawling portrait of ambition and obsession that gives Leonardo DiCaprio the role that announced his arrival as a serious dramatic actor. Scorsese’s recreation of Hollywood’s golden age and early aviation history is visually stunning, and DiCaprio’s portrayal of Howard Hughes’s descent into mental illness is brave and unflinching. The 170-minute runtime stretches some sequences past their natural endpoint, and the supporting characters can’t always compete with the spectacle at the center. But as a study of what extraordinary talent costs the person who carries it, the film achieves something truly moving.