The Aviator

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Today I watched Spartacus, and it got me thinking about when beloved directors make bigger, studio/genre films, and not the more personal films we love them for. It's interesting to see their unique style etched onto a generic template.

Spartacus is clearly a case where Kubrick didn't have much of a personal connection to the material, and as a result it feels more like a typical genre entry than it does a Kubrick film. The Aviator, however, is a great success. Scorsese takes the standard template of an expensive studio biopic and he tailgates it on the freeway, cuts it off, pulls it out of its car and beats the living shit out of it until it submits. He owns it. Hell, after he's done beating on it, he throws it in the trunk of his car, brings it home, chains it up in his basement, tattoos his name on it and makes it his sex slave.

I think I'm in the minority, but I think it's one of his best. It doesn't have many of his usual themes and obsessions, sure. He's working a little outside of his box here, but I like that. It's something different for him, a challenge. And he proves what a born filmmaker he is by taking what could have been a good but generic Oscar-grab movie and making it undeniably a Scorsese film. The Aviator would be a masterpiece alone just taken on a technical level... it is such a big, expensive, visually complex epic that never once seems to make a wrong move in the staging, or fail to create the appropriate atmosphere. But it is also, to me, one of Scorsese's most moving and insightful films. We know that great acting in one of his movies is a given, but I think we rarely care this much about the characters.

I've seen this one 4 or 5 times now, and it honestly gets better every time. Although well-liked, it was unfairly dismissed by the critical establishment as not being as personal or intimate of a film. (I guess because it lacks his usual catholic guilt). Give it a little more time, though, and I think people will remember it as one of the best biopics ever made.