The Life Eccentric

The Life Eccentric
by Ed Owens

After a week or more in limited release, Martin Scorsese's epic Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator and Wes Anderson's latest quirky tragi-comedy The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou opened in wide release on Christmas day. Both paint pictures of eccentric adventurers who pushed the limits of their respective fields, but only one manages to delight in spite of its flaws.

The Aviator follows the infamous life of eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, beginning with the troubled shoot of his entry into movie-making, Hell's Angels, and continuing on through the eventual senate investigations of his wartime government projects. Hughes was a man known almost as much for his neuroses as for taking huge risks that sometimes proved remarkably lucrative (he invested nearly $4 million into the independent film Hell's Angels at a bleak economic time when the studios' authority stood virtually unchallenged). While his films broke barriers in Hollywood (he's the man responsible for the violent Paul Muni gangster film Scarface and the “prurient” Jane Russell western The Outlaw), Hughes' himself was breaking aviation barriers (he broke the speed record, the coast to coast record, and set the record for best time around the world -- cutting Lindbergh's New York to Paris record in half in the process). But behind the ambitious, hard-pressing public persona was a man plagued with fear and doubt, not of his ability to succeed (he was perhaps overly confident, many would say to the point of arrogance), but of the world around him.

While the film leaves out the last years of Hughes' life, years of reclusive hysteria that would in many ways tarnish the fame garnered by his earlier achievements, it evocatively depicts his prime as a thrilling (and sometimes frightening) rush of heady adventure. Scorsese adopts a unique color scheme early on, mimicking the processes of early color to give the film a more historical, almost nostalgic feel. The technique particularly stands out in only a few scenes, but is subtle enough that its evolution throughout the film is almost transparent. The cinematography by Robert Richardson (a long-time favorite of Oliver Stone who had previously worked with Scorsese on Bringing Out The Dead and Casino) provides the perfect complement, especially in the flying scenes, while Howard Shore's score and the jazz/swing soundtrack are both wonderful and wonderfully integrated. But none of this would matter without a solid central performance by Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes.

While DiCaprio never quite gets past being DiCaprio, he does manage to capture and convey Hughes' seemingly boundless enthusiasm and ambition, while also convincingly portraying the tics and quirks of Hughes neurosis. Cate Blanchett arguably has the harder role as Katherine Hepburn, life-long love of Hughes' and ultimately one of the few people who really understood him. Hepburn is loved by and familiar to many, so Blanchett has to live up to some pretty high expectations, but while there are moments that feel forced (an early scene with Hughes and Hepburn playing golf is particularly jarring), the performance as a whole is amazing -- while never completely convinced that Blanchett is Hepburn, I definitely found myself forgetting it was Blanchett. The other performances are all solid, including John C. Reilly as Hughes' accountant, Alec Baldwin as the head of rival airline Pan Am, and Alan Alda as a senator out to get Hughes (not to mention a host of cameos and small parts), but the movie belongs to DiCaprio, and he carries it well.

On a technical level, Scorsese is firing on all cylinders, but emotionally the film is a bit distant. While the film's portrayal of Hughes' ambitions and anxieties is compelling, the character, like the man himself, remains somewhat elusive -- the film is a fascinating character study that never quite manages to make us feel for the character being studied. While this doesn't prevent The Aviator from being a truly engaging viewing experience, it's a detached engagement that may be disappointing to some, preventing the film from reaching the stratospheric heights to which it, like its hero, aspires.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, on the other hand, never even manages to leave the ground. Wes Anderson's latest so-hip-it-hurts offering tells the story of faux-Cousteau oceanographer Steve Zissou (affectedly rather than affectingly played by Bill Murray), a documentarian in the twilight of his prime. When a beloved member of his crew is eaten by a new species of shark, Steve sets out to find it, accompanied by his loyal crew, a journalist (Cate Blanchett), and his would-be son (Owen Wilson).

Narratively, the film is an episodic mess, a thoroughly unconvincing series of seemingly random events that somehow manages to build to nothing at all -- important, or seemingly so, details are introduced and discarded with reckless abandon, the only interest seeming to be in throwing as much quirk at the screen as possible. Anderson 's evolution as a filmmaker made The Life Aquatic... inevitable: while his debut film, Bottle Rocket, was a quirky and off-beat charmer, each successive film has become more and more impenetrable, technical exercises in clever and not-so clever serio-comic quirkiness with diminishing returns each time. I have generally liked his films, but The Life Aquatic... is the filmmaker at his worst -- self-impressed, self-important, and, ultimately, self-defeating. Bill Murray provides as much ballast as possible, but he is overwhelmingly defeated by Anderson 's paper-thin characterization and water-logged direction (the remaining cast is pretty much wasted, serving as little more than an oddball assortment of misfits and narrative conveniences).

An endless succession of pointless gags and jarringly intrusive musical cues (in probably the worst combination of both, Zissou's crew features a man whose sole purpose seems to be covering David Bowie tunes in Portuguese), The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou grows tiresome long before it sets out to sea, and while there are moments that certainly approach affecting, they are so encumbered by the dead-weight surrounding them that it's hard even to feign interest, much less actually care.