The Aviator

Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator" is a film of considerable technical ambition and historical sweep, yet it remains indifferent to the concerns that would later preoccupy cinema. The picture presents Howard Hughes as a tragic figure undone by his own pathologies rather than by the systems that enabled his wealth and influence. Cate Blanchett's Oscar-winning turn as Katharine Hepburn is the film's most notable concession to female presence, though she exists primarily as a romantic foil to DiCaprio's Hughes. Kate Beckinsale's Ava Gardner suffers a similar fate, her agency consumed by the narrative machinery that renders her an object of Hughes's desire and eventual possession.

The film's treatment of neurodivergence deserves acknowledgment. Scorsese depicts Hughes's obsessive-compulsive disorder with genuine specificity, from his compulsive handwashing to his phobic responses to contamination. Yet this representation exists in service of a pathology narrative rather than any meaningful exploration of disability as lived experience. Hughes's mental illness becomes the engine of his decline, a tragic inevitability that the film observes with sympathy but not with any particular cultural consciousness.

The Aviator emerges as a quintessentially early-2000s prestige biopic, one that takes its wealthy white male subject entirely seriously while treating everyone around him as supporting players in his personal drama. The film contains no interrogation of Hughes's capitalism, his treatment of women, or the racial dimensions of early aviation and Hollywood. It simply tells his story, beautifully composed and meticulously crafted, but utterly unconcerned with the social frameworks that would later become standard in popular cinema.