Reseñas de la crítica

With Scorsese's long-gestating Silence finally coming out later this month, and Warren Beatty's Howard Hughes-related Rules Don't Apply having recently come and gone in theaters, Scorsese's own Hughes biopic has surely popped back into people's minds recently. But The Aviator is worth revisiting now in light not only of Beatty's truly strange screwball comedy-drama, but of Scorsese's output since then.

The Aviator is a confounding movie, asking us to identify with and understand a man who would never have been able to come down from the clouds and meet us eye to eye. But this is one thing that cinema can do, making the larger than life seem not only on the level but also, even, smaller than us.

By and large I think this movie's chief function is to give Scorsese an opportunity to indulge in the pleasures of big-time filmmaking and to treat the audience to a heady dose of glamour — knocking our socks off with period re-creations of the Cocoanut Grove, Grauman's Chinese, and two-strip Technicolor. All that's justification enough for any entertainment, and on this level The Aviator does even better than most of Hughes's own movies... There just isn't a lot to chew on once it's over.