Saturday, August 27, 2005
Rich Icarus
So what's next on the Netflix Queue but Scorsese's answer to Altman's Vincent and Theo. That's how it felt anyway — a movie by Scorsese that showed how a troubled creative person can be portrayed in the movies, even if van Gogh and Howard Hughes aren't exactly in the same league.
Scorsese's film about American eccentric Howard Hughes, an obsessive tinkerer — if he were poor he would be called a mental case — is satisfying. Scorsese infuses empathy into the story of Hughes' sad decline, producing a beautifully mounted, if conventional movie. Where Altman lazily strung together one downer of a scene after another in Vincent and Theo, Scorsese imaginatively enters into the world of Hughes, an act which is really a gift of love. We get a sense of a man whose dreams and ambitions burst all normal constraints, who had the resources and self confidence to act on those yearnings, rather than wasting his life in further accumulation; we end up feeling neither condescendingly sorry for Hughes, nor cackling with the easy scorn directed at poor little rich boys, but rather we feel compassion for Hughes and his horrific outcome.
So many scenes in the movie had that rare chemistry, where director and actors hit some indefinable sweet spot — Scorsese and actors nearly emitted a chime they were so right on; DiCaprio was great, as were the female leads. Scorsese so loves, and is a scholar of movies, that he can make you root for a man, who at the time, was one of the richest men in the world.