My favorite story about Howard Hughes barely involves Howard Hughes. Clifford Irving an author best known, in 1971 or so, for penning an extremely groovy (and I mean that as a reflection on his writing, not my opinion of the book) bio of the infamous art forger Elmyr de Hory, called Fake! (Orsen Welles' movie F for Fake documents the affair). To put an extremely fine point on it, I think the most faking that Elmyr did was to collaborate with a film maker and an author to create a mostly fictional legend of a forger, and thus (due to his outrageous claim to just how many masterpieces hanging in museums were his) to cast a shadow on the entire art establishment. It was a post-modern prank of mammoth proportion, in the sense that it really dealt with one issue: what is the worth of the hand that creates, as opposed to another hand that creates the exact same thing? It's really worship of an aristocracy that a Picasso is worth so much more than Braque. Appropriate, then, that Elmyr claimed to be descended from Hungarian royalty (Zsa Zsa Gabor, supposedly, once said of Elymr "Never trust a Hungarian. They're all liars." Problem being, she's Hungarian too).
Anyway, fresh with a bit of notoriety, Irving approached a McGraw-Hill with evidence--a signed contract, hand-written pages--that Howard Hughes had agreed to let Irving pen his autobiography. A larger book could not be imagined at the time, since Hughes was then a mythic hermit, living in Las Vegas in a hotel he bought so that he wouldn't be evicted watching a television station he bought so that it would show movies through the night for his consumption. Irving won a large advance, $750,000 or so, but Hughes made contact with the outside world via telephone just long enough to denounce the author as bogus. Those interested parties will find a wealth more information here (including a good overview of the real Hughes' life), and I also recommend reading Fake! It's quite amusing.
It's my favorite story about Hughes in the same way that I love the story about Elmyr. It's not whether or not he's telling the truth, it's the uncertainty that is the crux of the issue. To confuse things, long after doing his time (two-and-a-half years) in federal prison, Irving published 'The Autobiography of Howard Hughes' through an online publisher. Of course, the device of calling something an autobiography by another author is not unknown (hello Gertrude Stein!), but I know of no other author who published a fake autobiography of a man that the author was arrested for conning people about.
Irving claims, that through his research and allegedly stealing another manuscript, that he knows more about Hughes than anybody. He claims that the autobiography is real--or at least as real as humanly possible. Certainly, when dealing with a man as large and known as Hughes, the legend becomes the persona.
Smart, then, of the makers of the Aviator to focus on the legend. After all, the legend has enough sub-stories that could have been standalone movies: 1) A radical movie producer story. 2) An obsessive starlet collector movie. 3) A man degraded by OCD and, so it appears, syphilis story. 4) A radical aviation pioneer story. 5) A businessman who bucked trends and made a mint story.
It's a fast paced, deliberately visual film (something that can't be said of many movies these days). Scorsese uses the classic film language to tell a story not of truth, but of impression and metaphor. He does it in an seemingly effortless way, marrying stunning visuals with emotional resonance. Extremely well crafted.
The question of whether or not Blanchett captured Hepburn, or Beckinsale Gardner (who, Beckinsale that is, should keep the 20 lbs she put on for the role) is immaterial. I think Blanchett outdid herself. Same for Leo, who has completely redeemed Titanic, in my eyes. The cast is great, and the cameos fun--especially the befuddled performance of the great Ian Holm.
We were going to try to see as many Oscar contenders as possible. I'm very glad we picked this one and got to see it projected rather than on the small screen.
Christine pointed out that Cassavetes, no matter who was in the foreground, kept Gena Rowlands centered in the frame. She was the focal point of every scene she was in, even as Peter Falk bullied his way into center stage. You can't blame the director, since his wife was not only beautiful, but pervasively dynamic and completely unpredictable.
Most actors playing crazy play really crazy. Think Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys, or Halle Barry in (bleh) Gothika. They play it supremely affected--broad strokes of madness to display, with thespian zeal, just how crazy their character truly is.
But real madness, as played beautifully by Rowlands and Falk, is about confusion. Are they really crazy? Sometimes they seem sane, and sometimes they don't--but where is that dividing line where you make the leap from harmlessly whacky to helplessly mad? This question all the more disturbing in the days when a man could have his wife committed with the snap of a finger. If roles were reversed, and Rowlands held a job every day, what would Falk's reaction to her be? How unstable would he seem, caring for kids by strong arming them to have fun and feeding them beer dinners? Would she have him committed if she could?
Madness, also, could be mis-read cues. Is Rowlands truly mad, or is she a woman desiring of consistent attention from a husband whose mood changes on whim? Is she passively-aggressively asserting herself in an environment where true assertion gets shouted down? Maybe she is a bit mad--as her mannerisms suggest.
It's this questioning of the madness that makes the performances so harrowing. People don't fit into the surprisingly narrow definitions we love to use with them. Sometimes they swing from one category to another before we can re-evaluate their classification. Rowlands is so vulnerable you wish to go hold her, but you suspect that when you do she'd hold you back with both arms. Then, when you walked away she'd wish to be held again and the cycle repeats itself.
Testing love is like testing faith in the biblical sense--it's probably not a good idea. In the opera Cosi Fan Tutte two young men, arrogant that their lovers are true, wage a bet to test them. Seems like a bad idea, eh? Anytime someone asks you to test an article of faith with a wager, I would lay odds back to you that this person has inside knowledge that they will win. They're betting on your arrogance.
So why test love? Like the poet Heather McHugh says: "Just feel until you feel felt." If you don't test that love, how do you know that the love is there? It's like that feeling one gets when meditating, or just laying still--where your body disappears. How do you know your body is still there? Best to move your arm. It may ruin the illusion of your body being gone, but it will also reassure you that it hasn't altogether left you.
Cosi Fan Tutte plays a minor role in this film, being the opera that Jude Law and Julia Roberts miss seeing. I doubt they would have paid attention anyway. They probably would have talked through the whole thing and been shushed. These characters are the special sort of people for whom their own exquisite tortures are the fabric of life. They constantly work at weaving them, and only seem happy right before they tear a finished square back to bare thread.
Much can be said about the acting, which was right on mark, and extremely well directed. Portman was good and bold, and I'm glad she's distancing herself a bit from the Amidala role, as well as the cutesy type of roles that her good looks might lend themselves too. I like seeing Jude Law fail occasionally, he plays the winner so well. About Julia Roberts, well--I'm a little unsure of her. She has gracious star power and beauty, but what's interesting is that we learn mostly about her character from the observations of Clive Owen. We're almost sure that he's wrong about her, until she does exactly what he expects exactly when he expects it. In this movie, his arrogance is the mark of the bet worth taking.
A movie like this makes the world of relationships so confusing that my head is spinning thinking about the unclear, dramatically operatic ways at which the characters played each other. That's the goal, I think. The more confused your opponents are, the longer it'll take for them to learn that you just made off with their wallet. They call it a confidence game, said David Mamet in House of Games, not because you give your confidence to the con man, but because he gives his confidence to you.
I'm a fan of the talkie movies--the ones that do it well, that is. Movies that have people moving about in exterior worlds while the real action takes place in their internal ones. Or, more to the point, the action takes place in the intersection of people's internal worlds, as expressed by dialogue.
One reason I love them is because the films operate on two levels. You could walk away form this particular talking movie and say that it's about sex, but of course it's not at all about sex. It's not even about one character's views or ideas, but about social behavior and how our company changes our footing and what we talk about.
There are four distinct social groups witnessed here: Men talking with men alone with nobody around to hear them. Women talking with women alone with nobody around to hear them. Lovers talking alone with nobody around to hear them, and professors talking to classes, presumably with everybody listening.
1. THE MEN
They speak like ribald poets or priests at the temple of sexuality, each rushing to prove their devotion to the act above the others.
2. THE WOMEN
Speak like detached observers into the circus of ribald poets, who occasionally get pulled out of the audience to be part of the show.
3. THE LOVERS
They either speak or have sex, but the speaking isn't about intimacy any more than the sex appears to be.
4. THE PROFESSORS
Speak in big ideas to mask their feelings of helplessness. They are talking about themselves when they talk about society. When one character talks about obsession with pleasure and happiness being signs of the end of an empire, she is really speaking about herself, and her own guilt about her own actions. That guilt plays itself out in a particularly nasty way later in the movie.
This movie is not about the ideas of the characters, but about why the characters have these ideas. I may write more about this later, but essentially this is my maxim about movies, most especially movies with lots of dialogue: Movies are about the power in relationships. Who has it, who wants it, who is acting out because they don't have it. I challenge my reader(s) to name me one movie where this is not the case textually or subtextually. I personally can't think of any.
Denys Arcand certainly understands this, and plays it well in his films.
IMDB
My opinion of this film didn't change seeing it for the second time, and that's a good thing. Paul Giamatti should have gotten an Oscar nomination. It speaks to two things that he didn't.
First, that the field of male actors was overrun with great performances this year. A lot of those roles are more Oscar-prone due to their more emotional and worldly topics. I mean, we have the amazingly deserving Don Cheadle, who is too often overlooked as an actor (for similar reasons that I'm going to give below for Giamatti). This year he plays a role that the Academy couldn't ignore, as penance for America turning our back on the Rwandan genocide. We have Johnny Depp, Leo in one of those sprawling, huge movies that Oscar loves, Clint--and Clint is always great, and then Jamie Foxx, being nominated, I think, for the "Ohmigod, that guy can really ACT. We just thought he was a silly comedian/action sidekick" reaction, on top of what seems to be a remarkable performance.
Second, Paul Giamatti played the role in Sideways so well, and so believably that he convinces you that he really is that guy. Looking into his life, with a un-Hollywood car, in an un-Hollywood apartment, and completely un-Hollywood environs, it's more like hanging out with this dude you know, as opposed to spending time inside an idealized life, as most movies suggest. The fact that Giamatti isn't really like that in reality bears no weight, I'm afraid. It was also just a bit too close to Harvey Pekar in it's shy sad sackiness. I think that many people overlooked him because they may see this role as typecasting--Giamatti was good because he played himself. Of course, that's bullshit, but my completely amateur analysis must be true, right? How else can you describe his lack of nomination.
As for who I would replace to put Giamatti on the list--well, I don't know not having seen any of the other films. It's kind of like watching the O.J. trial and thinking "Chist, that dude is so guilty." and then thinking "What the hell? How can people defend him?" without thinking "Well, I'm not on the jury in this trial, I haven't heard all the evidence, and you have to trust that those 12 people are trying their hardest they can to be objective, because that's what our justice system is based on. Not trial by Inside Edition, trial by jury." In other words, I can't second guess the jurors without being in their place. But I certainly can say this:
Yo Giamatti! You were totally robbed, dude.
On a side note, I saw this movie in a theater in Bellingham, Washington, where I spent my high-school years. It was in this theater that my oldest sister took me to see Blade Runner, one of the formative cinematic experiences of my life.