The Aviator

Last night, I re-lived the bliss of watching the movie that I long ago decided was my all-time favorite movie: The Aviator, with the stunning Leonardo DiCaprio.

It became my favorite movie the minute I walked out of the theater having seen it for the first time. Ever since then, whenever I want someone to get to know me, or whenever I'm in the middle of a deep conversation with a new close friend, I tend to somehow work in an opportunity to quote DiCaprio, as Howard Hughes, repeating: "The way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future."

If the person I am speaking to finds this funny, then s/he will be able to understand me. If not, then probably not. It's very simple.

What does it say about me, that my "ALL-TIME FAVORITE MOVIE" is The Aviator? Well, I begin to answer this by first pointing you toward my previous favorite movie, before I had seen The Aviator. It was: The English Patient.

For this, the very first blog post in a series where I discuss my favorite movies, we'll have a perfect introduction by comparing The Aviator and The English Patient. Both of these movies have a tragic hero. That is crucial. Both of these movies have a flawed tragic hero, reminiscent of ancient Greek literature. Both of these movies tend toward the romantic, in style, philosophy and substance. Both of these movies are absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous to watch -- Both movies fill the screen with huge, lucid portraits of landscapes, skies, architecture and masterpieces of human engineering. Both of these movies are masterpieces of cinematography.

Both of these movies have an extremely handsome male lead. Both of these movies have a quirky, unusual, melodramatic, introspective, fearful and socially awkward male character as the lead. And the things he must do! to make us love him. In both cases.

Both of these movies have Drama, with a capital D. Some would argue that both of these movies are overly dramatic and overly romantic -- that they veer so far from realism that they are unbearable. In their very unbearableness, they are both beautiful. Whether it is an apocalyptic small plane crash where the roofs of Los Angeles are torn in two and burst aflame, or a poetic dialogue between two lovers trapped in a dark car while a desert sandstorm gusts around them, the scenes in these movies will echo eternally in the walls of your imagination. They will not let you go.

Isn't the height of good Drama just fundamentally defined by how readily you are taken away from the mundane and lifted up into an experience that challenges your imagination? Your mind must burn new neural territory in order to accomodate how alive this makes you feel, and in order to burnish words for the new aesthetic you have been given.

So -- that's a nice introduction, isn't it? But let's talk just a little bit about why The Aviator is better than The English Patient.

First of all, The English Patient has a weaker plot. It relies on the adaptation of a book; the adaptation was much better than the book, (yes, I read it) --it kept the romantic magic the author intended. It just didn't translate in terms of the action into a movie. The action becomes, in the movie, a story of a love affair and a cuckolded husband, set against a backdrop of a war. The war becomes the most important character, and the moral message of "War is Evil" does not roll out lightly. No, it thunders down. The war/Evil character is primarily responsible for what befalls everyone in the movie. The burns on the patient; the bombing of loved ones; the missing thumbs; even the fatal union of the lovers is shaped by war. The war/Evil is so obviously the lowest, most morally wrong of all the wrongs that could be -- so much so that the affair, and the harm it does to the cuckolded husband, become forgivable and seem less wrong. They are let off the hook completely.

Which, in turn, (deeply analyzing the plot at this point, so follow along with me), almost destroys the weight of the problem for the two lovers. You may think that the lovers are driving the plot, but you see, they're not really. How could it be so important for them to stay apart, given what's going on with the war? --The plot is weak. Upon repeated viewings it becomes tiresome.

Ralph Fiennes is damned good and Kristin Scott Thomas earned my lifelong admiration. I have never been able to forget the charm of Naveen Andrews. I love the movie still, and I'll keep it on my favorites list. But it definitely got knocked down several bars as time went on and I saw more movies.

The Aviator is breathless and literally, awesome. The planes alone -- the engineering -- make the film worth watching. Right from the start you are treated to triumphant scenes. Hughes informs his new CFO that he's standing looking at the "largest private airforce in the entire world." So right away you get the scope of it. The planes swoop and duck, and sometimes you get this amazing angle as if you were in one of the planes yourself! Cate Blanchett steps in to play Katharine Hepburn, and you feel that as a movie viewer you have suddenly gone to Heaven without having died. DiCaprio makes you know Hughes, makes you know not only Hughes' temper and stridency, passion and vulnerability, but also his shyness, his nightmares, and his inner ego. I have never in all my life felt like I could live inside another human's brain as much as DiCaprio allowed me permission to live inside Hughes'. And I relate to Hughes. I relate to him because anyone with a big heart would have to relate to him. We've all been that vulnerable at some point. We've all wished we were that powerful.

Plot, as far as it goes, in this movie takes on one of my criteria for "HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL DIRECTING;" which is to say, it is subtle and nuanced. I can't even sum up the plot in a few sentences. I might be able to say that it is a biopic of Howard Hughes, which is vague enough not to touch the plot question, but avoid it altogether! Or, I might be able to sum up the plot in a few paragraphs. That's the range. For example, I might write a paragraph about each of these questions: is it a movie about competing airlines? Is it a movie about United States history? Is it about obsessive-compulsive disorder? Is it a love story? Is it about Hollywood? Is it about money and greed, power and fame? Holy shit, buddy: it's about all of those things and more. This movie is, in short, epic. It's epic because it's directed by Martin Scorsese. He has a knack for making things larger than life, nuanced, and unforgettable. I'll write more on the perfect partnership of Scorsese and DiCaprio soon, when I discuss another fave, The Gangs of New York.

There are so many scenes in this movie that I could rave about. I don't know what excited me more: the sweeping interior of a Hollywood lounge, the plane crash scene mentioned above, the lights of nighttime LA as Cate and Leo glide above it in a gentle airplane motion (that you as the viewer can actually feel, like you're back in childhood riding the Peter Plan flight ride at Disneyland), or the horror of the dank red theater in which Hughes slides into craziness, growing wolflike and repeating his instructions for milk delivery into the void. This movie is SO big in my imagination. It takes me to SO many different places, unreal places, vivid dreamscapes. It satisfies me intellectually, too -- when Hughes takes the microphone into his overscrubbed fingers and charges Senator Brewster with corruption, this is quite a bit more than a history lesson. The movie is political, and DiCaprio is at his best in those scenes.

Shall I go on? On a personal note, the scene when Hughes burns all of his clothing after Hepburn walks out on him will always move my heart. On a technical note, the scene where Hughes is barraged by cameras for the debut of his movie, and bulbs are smoking, popping and exploding all around him, is the best piece of cinematography that I have ever witnessed.

If you don't believe me, watch it again.

So we have powerful acting, (of the highest caliber -- the kind that makes you intimate with the characters), nuanced direction, action-packed and complex screenwriting, layered and intellectual plotlines, unforgettable cinematography, and stellar stylistic design from head to toe. It has the best ending to a film that I can possibly imagine, with one the most ironic and memorable lines of dialogue for its concluding sequence.

One last thing: The Aviator bears watching again. And again. And again.

Charlie Wilson's War, The Jane Austen Book Club, My Summer of Love

What do these three movies have in common? The enchanting, daring Emily Blunt. I've become a great admirer of hers. The first time I saw her in a film - which I won't discuss right now - was actually something else, something called "Gideon's Daughter." That was beautiful, too, but I've decided that in this blog I'm going to write reactions to movies I've just seen. I won't start writing about all the movies I've seen in the past. It would be fun, but then I'd never get anything else done.

So let's talk about these three. In "Charlie Wilson's War," Emily Blunt has a very small appearance, but it's crucial. It happens so fast you almost don't realize it's happening. We've just barely been introduced to the character of Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks); so far we've seen him in two settings: 1) Las Vegas and 2) his office. In his office we see women with big hair, cleavage and a mysterious efficiency belying their bimbo looks. So we've gotten a quick and dirty impression of who the man is and what he likes and the way he likes it. OK. Then there's a small scene in which Peter Gerety comes in as a Texas preacher demanding a defense for displaying a creche on secular land. He brings along his daughter Jane (Emily Blunt), for no apparent reason. Note she seems quiet, reserved, conservatively dressed - a good Christian girl. And she's just sitting there, waiting patiently while everyone runs around. Cut to the next scene. Jane is now in Charlie's suite, wearing only his shirt, sipping a cocktail. She continues to undress until she's wearing only underwear, and then we see her lounging on the sofa, her perfect long legs extended gracefully before us. She is a vision of seduction. Charlie, however, opts to take the phone call from Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) instead of paying attention to Jane.

Why this transition in Jane? Why is she in her underwear? How did Charlie seduce the nice Christian girl? How did the nice Christian girl turn out to be so sexy? And why is Charlie not taking advantage of the situation? Why give Emily this short and seemingly meaningless appearance? The phone call has to be really important.

It is. It's the phone call that gets the whole plot moving. Joanne gets Charlie to go to Houston, then she gets him to go to Pakistan, then she gets him to go into Afghanistan, and the rest is history. So think of it! Think of how important this phone call has to be to get the movie rolling. And then, further think how attractive and seductive Emily Blunt has to be, in order to highlight the importance of the phone call - that Charlie should choose to ignore her and stay on the phone.

In "The Jane Austen Book Club," Emily Blunt plays a lonely, snobbish young French teacher named Prudie, unhappily married to a man who doesn't appreciate her. She's the odd woman out in the book club, having been invited on a whim by a stranger, while the other women know each other already. At the outset, Prudie's probably your least favorite of the women in the club, (Maria Bello is probably your favorite), unless you like lonely, prude-y, pale-faced women with dark hair and light eyes. At first we don't sympathize with her plight of being married to an unappreciative husband. (That is a worn-out cliche and the film suffers for it as well as others scattered throughout.) No, the only thing worth noticing about Prudie at the outset of the movie is that she is very pretty in an unopened-flower kind of way.

Then one of her students forms a crush on her, and this blurs her sharp borderlines for a minute, and then her aging-hippie mother shows up with some marijuana and this too, creates a mess in Prudie's life and she begins to be more interesting. At some point in Prudie's gradual mellowing, when she begins talking to the book club members, we find out she has never even been to France. She cries, "A French teacher who has never been to France!" (or something like that). Ah, no wonder she was so upset her hubby wouldn't take her abroad.

I won't tell you how, in a climactic moment, Prudie unfolds, but I will say that it takes a really good actress to achieve the scope of change her character has to come through in a limited number of scenes. (And she's taking turns with Maria Bello and Kathy Baker and Amy Brenneman and others, almost competing with them for attention in a badly-constructed movie.) In an otherwise lame movie, Emily Blunt takes us from uninterested to curious to hooked - and admiring. Once again.

And if you really want an exciting performance from Emily Blunt please see "My Summer of Love," an exceptionally daring film about two British girls who try each other on for size. One is poor and orphaned and being raised by an ex-con-turned-preacher brother. That's Mona (Nathalie Press) whose accent tells us everything we need to know about her. The other girl is Tamsin (Emily Blunt) whose accent is very refined. Tamsin rides in on, literally, a white horse to save Mona from her brother, poverty, and boredom above all. She says in effect, 'Mona, you're a wild one, but come into my mansion and try on some beautiful dresses. Try on my life for a summer. See if you don't come out feeling beautiful.'

Tamsin is a self-described "fantasist" and she sure can weave a tale, whether it's a ghost story or a love story. She does tell Mona these and other stories quite convincingly, sipping red wine and making the viewer feel haunted or bewitched, right along with Mona. There's even one tall tale about Edith Piaf, and her alleged crimes of passion (I will admit, adding the gorgeous French voice belting out "La Foule" in the scene does provide support for Tamsin's spell-casting over Mona). What crime of passion will Mona commit at the end of all this, we wonder.