Citizen Insane

Howard Hughes was a Charles Foster Kane who turned into Bartleby: At first he was this terrific guy in a white shirt full of bright ideas, surrounded by dames and itching to fly; but in the end he was as mysterious and wretched as Herman Melville's poor scrivener, the guy who would rather not take part.

That is not what big holiday entertainments are usually about. So anyone going to The Aviator for "a good time" should keep the man's somber arc in mind: This epic is not going to turn out well. Martin Scorsese has done the energy and the accomplishment for all he's worth. You feel he wants to save Howard from himself. But Mr. Scorsese knows his movies, and he realizes how close the Hughes arc is to Citizen Kane, which had the same kind of melancholy at the end. Mr. Scorsese has tried to smother his own darkness here, but he can't deny or omit that sense of what dead ends await his hero. In 1941, when Hughes was still promising, flying and good-looking, Kane whispered that all was dust. It isn't our great film just because of technical innovations, deep focus and overlapping dialogue-it's because of what it means. And that's why Kane was a failure in 1941.

This is not meant simply as a film review-I'm talking about our history and our future. Several months ago, at a party in Malibu, I said to Warren Beatty that I was sorry to think of a Howard Hughes movie coming without him. That remark held no grudge against Leonardo DiCaprio or Martin Scorsese. And Mr. Beatty allowed how he had surely had his chance: It was 25 years ago that he talked seriously of doing the Hughes story, and he had a script then, a pretty good script that he had written himself. Perhaps he got lost in the trap in his early 40's, of being unable to decide at what age he should play Hughes: the young man, the tycoon from 1941 or the recluse, the Bartleby who retreated, the Hughes who gives every American success story the shakes? No matter how he was drawn to the man, no matter how far Mr. Beatty identified with the shyness, the uncertainty that needed to take only two steps toward the dark to be lost, he never made the decision to do the picture. Of course, Mr. Beatty is famous for that now-for not doing certain things. And I suspect he is quietly amused if children-even his own adored children-sometimes ask him, "Daddy, were you Warren Beatty?"

The young people who determine movie success now hardly know who Howard Hughes was-the man died in April 1976, at a time when America celebrated a bicentenary and took comfort in having handled Richard Nixon. Imagine the warmth and innocence of that year now. And The Aviator doesn't dare tell these children that for at least the last 10 years of his life, Hughes had been cut off from the world he had briefly amazed, and partly owned. But how do you make a film of the years in which a man existed in darkened hotel suites, watching drab action movies, drugged, gaunt, a shadow, beyond the reach of his wife, let alone any "Cheer up, Howard!" messages that Kate Hepburn might have sent him.

She liked him-more than liked-but she was an odd cold fish who ended up alone in a room, too. And she could see-even in the late 30's, as he paid for The Philadelphia Story for her, enabling her comeback after being box-office poison-that Howard wasn't quite all there. That he was already, in his odd way, watching the movie of his life, and losing interest. How do you make a Hollywood picture today about things like entropy, loss of belief and disquiet? How do you really penetrate the mind of a Bartleby? Don't we all, nowadays, have the habit of lowering our gaze and hurrying on by when we pass the crazies, the derelicts and the fixed dreamers on the street?

Even if you don't know much about the life and disappearance of Howard Hughes, you may gather that this is an unsettling story-and we don't tell those stories nowadays, do we? (No one mentioned Abu Ghraib in the Presidential debates.) After all, if we are the greatest nation on Earth, the one that makes no mistakes, the one that has God on its side, the one with the clout, what room can there be for sadness or dismay? We are going to stay positive-even if it gets shrill. What room do we leave for the tragic sense of existence? When we wonder why we don't make much art any more, don't forget the countless ways in which American thinking is determined to do away with the tragic.

And remember, if you will, that the movie we still regard, and vote, as our greatest, Citizen Kane, is a story of a man who had everything-the Colorado Lode, plus the not inconsiderable beauty and charm of Orson Welles. Howard Hughes was seldom accused of charm, and though he was sometimes described as tall, dark and handsome, just try finding pictures of Howard where he is smiling-or where the smile isn't stuck on, like the mustache. Of course, the cheerful or regulation answer to what happened to Howard Hughes is that he went mad, with a madness that may have been there always-and what can a happy world do about bad luck but overlook it?

So in The Aviator, a very reasonable compromise has been made. The film signs off in the mid- to late 1940's, when Hughes still had a public life, when he was a celebrity and not his own outcast. Yes, we see a line of urine bottles that stretches out to the crack of doom, and Leonardo DiCaprio does his best to inhabit dementia's cell by repeating certain lines over and over again. And we do have a nearly biblical tableau where his mother tells the child Hughes that the world is not safe, just as we have his increasing nervousness about touching or being touched. But those are no more than the wild anecdotes people told about Hughes. They do not get inside the man's head, or begin to justify to today's audience why there should be a film about Howard Hughes that is getting on toward three hours. We do not have him about to fuck Ava Gardner, but drawing back because he'd rather not-not just for the risk of infection, but because of the unlikely idea of company or togetherness.

Mr. DiCaprio is rather good. He has a pent-up frustration, like a little boy trying to be a man, that is interesting and touching. But then I think of the wistfulness that Mr. Beatty had as Clyde Barrow and, above all, as John Q. McCabe (a businessman with no head for business), and I wonder about the pained silences that he might have been drawn to as Hughes began to back away, and somehow I can't stop believing that they would be more eloquent than Mr. DiCaprio's fierce reiteration of certain phrases. And I even hear Orson Welles in some of those concerto-like interviews he did, silent at last, with the fulsome explanation and then the great belly-laugh of irony drained away-they are doing room tone-so that he is left as quiet as Falstaff the forsaken, or as silent and empty as Charlie Kane after he uttered "Rosebud." For the silence that we are meant not to notice or honor now- call it the American quiet-begins in disquiet.

There's a lot of splashy period in The Aviator, some of it as silly as Jude Law coming on and saying, "Hi, I'm Errol Flynn." (This has not been a good year for the cult of Jude Law.) Actors claim to be Noah Dietrich and those other decades-long careers that tried to assist or accompany the real Howard Hughes. Some say they are Jean Harlow (a travesty), Ava Gardner and Kate Hepburn. That's another Cate, Blanchett, and she has the timbre and the timing of the Connecticut gal-a treat. It's just that the script has no notion what to put inside the bright shell of being Hepburn. But we get the stunning Spruce Goose, the XF-11, a lovely Cocoanut Grove, and there is a haunting shot of 7000 Romaine Avenue at night which, I could believe, was the actual building in Los Angeles where Hughes had his premises-and has them still? Is it possible that nothing can quite close that place down or stop the possibility of its being haunted?

That's what it comes to with Howard Hughes: He is a ghost that young generations do not notice. He was a crazy old fellow who got so rich he lost his mind-that's the fortune-cookie verdict on weirdness in great ones, and the blithe disowning of all our urges to be rich, if we want to be American.

I'm not complaining if a film can't quite get Howard Hughes the whole man, because long before the end he had likely settled for being fragmentary, a matter of a few scenes here and there-fussing over Jane Russell's brassiere and not seeing the breasts; meeting you at 3 a.m. at the RKO studio, sighing and saying this probably wasn't the right time; watching Ice Station Zebra with syringes hanging out of his arm; sitting there at some nightclub with Ida Lupino; or even scorning some Senate investigating committee for all the world as if he were Dashiell Hammett.

We have these versions or broken pieces of Howard Hughes-he is Jason Robards in the desert in Melvin and Howard, the pick-up that could change your life; he is Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan) in Max Ophüls' film Caught, when, according to legend, Hughes gave straight-faced advice to Ryan on how to play the part. He is the lead figure in The Carpetbaggers, and now he is The Aviator. He was the voice that addressed reporters at the time of the Clifford Irving affair and said no, no, this is fraud-but you'd have to remember who Clifford Irving was to get that one. And with so many Hughes stories, how could any of them be true-or untrue?

He is also a man who, as far as I can tell, contrived to die in the air, on the way from Acapulco to Houston. I say "contrived," and you can doubt the significance of his intervention, since he was also unconscious at the time and maybe even comatose. But no one knows for sure how conscious ghosts need to be.

As I said, it is a story that ends very badly, and it is up to us whether we ascribe that to craziness, to illness, or to giving up the ghost.

That last answer, I fear, does reflect on all of us and on our desperate lives of achievement. That is why it's so hard to sell the story of Howard Hughes. He was a downer; he preferred not to in the end. But it wasn't just that he agreed that there are no second acts in American history. No, he said, there are second acts-and they are as prolonged, as inert and vacant, as the best medical research can manage. He left most of his money to medicine, don't forget, and I suspect that was because he'd guessed how that unending second act of life barely sustained was our just reward. So I encourage the kids to carry on oblivious of Howard Hughes. He is not for you. That way lies dismay, the thoughts that fill the early hours of any morning when the drug has worn off, or the times of day when no one can believe in just being American any longer.

A time is coming, a time is close, when America faces its own future. And that is the moment for looking at Howard Hughes and knowing that being No. 1 was nowhere near enough. And for being afraid. But not quite yet.