I'd like someday to see an amnesty for "stolen" Oscars -- those Academy Awards given to someone when someone else clearly deserved it more. Among those tossed on this particular pile would be Helen Hunt's Oscar for As Good as It Gets, which should have gone to Kate Winslet; Marisa Tomei's 1993 award for My Cousin Vinny, which should have gone to any of the other nominees (Judy Davis, Vanessa Redgrave, Miranda Richardson, or Joan Plowright); and certainly Kevin Costner's award for Dances With Wolves, which should have gone to Martin Scorsese for Goodfellas, one of, if not the best film of the 1990's.

Perhaps if the Academy had done its job, Scorsese could feel free to do the kind of work of which we know he's capable, instead of trying to find the film that will get him the pot of gold.

It's not that THE AVIATOR is a bad film. On the contrary,it's a very good film: well-paced, well, if a bit too famously cast, beautifully shot, with a smart script, solid-to-excellent performances, and a playful sense of filmmaking that we haven't seen from Scorsese before. And it's superbly entertaining for its entire 168 minutes. Yet in watching Scorsese's long-awaited Howard Hughes biopic, it seemed a highly disciplined film at odds with its subject's sense of can-do enthusiasm. It's a doggedly determined film that often seems at odds with the light touch he's attempting to bring to its protagonist. Scorsese seems so haunted by the Academy's repeated snubs, as well as by the inescapable parallels between Howard Hughes and Orson Welles' Charles Foster Kane, that this most visceral of filmmakers is entirely too cautious, and as a result this very good film falls just short of being a great one.

Thank goodness for both of them that Leonardo DiCaprio has become Scorsese's late-life male muse, for in the role of the man most Americans know only as the eccentric madman billionaire, DiCaprio finally, at age thirty, gets a grown-up to play, and as a bonus, it's a highly complex grown-up to boot. DiCaprio has been haunted for the past seven years by the ghost of Jack Dawson, and until THE AVIATOR, it seemed as though his best work may have been behind him, particularly as he becomes too old (though he still looks barely more than sixteen) to portray Angry Young Boys and yet still doesn't look old enough to play men as yet. Steven Spielberg directed DiCaprio's boyish face, slight frame (he's over six feet tall, but photographs much smaller) and thin, reedy voice to a pitch-perfect performance as Frank Abagnale in last year's breezy Catch Me If You Can, whereas in the next room at the multiplex, Scorsese was directing him badly as a bulked-up Irish downtown thug in Gangs of New York.

It was DiCaprio who brought The Aviator to Scorsese, rather than the other way around, and one has the sense that the director mostly allowed his young star to create the character as he envisioned him. DiCaprio looks barely a day older than he did in Titanic, in which he wanted to give a plot device masquerading as a character a dark side so he could actually show some chops, instead of just smiling sunnily and mouthing platitudes while the world falls apart around him. Hughes has enough of a dark side to be challenging, but it's in the early scenes, in which Hughes is a brash young man who's inherited enough money to do whatever he wants, where DiCaprio is at his best. He's confident enough as an actor to give even the young Hughes some heft, while palpably demonstrating the energy, optimism, and sheer audacity of the man for whom twenty-four cameras to film a flight sequence just weren't enough and if this film is to be believed, built successful businesses by bankrupting them in rapid succession. It's when the demons take over that DiCaprio seems just a wee bit "actorish", though he infuses Hughes with a sometimes touching vulnerability; and it's in Hughes' personal relationships that DiCaprio seems overmatched, particularly set against Cate Blanchett's powerhouse of a portrayal of Katharine Hepburn.

Portraying an iconic figure like Hepburn in the year of her death would be daunting to an ordinary actress, but Blanchett is no ordinary actress. With an uncanny ability to inhabit any character she plays and disappear into any persona, she doesn't so much resemble Hepburn as channel her. A scene in which Hepburn brings Hughes to meet her family has, perhaps intentionally, strong echoes of the First Class Dinner scene in Titanic, only here DiCaprio's character is clearly out of his element, for all his money. This scene also features a terrific cameo by Frances Conroy (of Six Feet Under fame) as Hepburn's "liberal elite" mother, with the exact same speech patterns with which we grew familiar from the daughter. The minute Blanchett hits the screen, the film comes alive, and it begins to sag the minute she leaves it. The problem is that her Hepburn is such a force of nature that she leaves DiCaprio in the dust, and the film leaves the impression that Hepburn was the love of Hughes' life, from which he and to some lesser degree this film, never recovered.

Portraying an iconic figure like Hepburn in the year of her death would be daunting to an ordinary actress, but Blanchett is no ordinary actress. With an uncanny ability to inhabit any character she plays and disappear into any persona, she doesn't so much resemble Hepburn as channel her. A scene in which Hepburn brings Hughes to meet her family has, perhaps intentionally, strong echoes of the First Class dinner scene in Titanic, only here DiCaprio's character is clearly out of his element, for all that this time his character could buy and sell his dining companions ten times over. This scene also features a terrific cameo by Frances Conroy (of Six Feet Under fame) as Hepburn's "liberal elite" mother, with the exact same speech patterns with which we grew familiar from the daughter. The minute Blanchett hits the screen, the film comes alive, and it begins to sag the minute she leaves it. The problem is that her Hepburn is such a force of nature that she leaves DiCaprio in the dust, and the film leaves the impression that Hepburn was the love of Hughes' life, from which he and to some lesser degree this film, never recovered.

The Aviator is one great-looking film, as we might expect, and it is in the design and pacing that Scorsese shows the master he is. The 1920's nightclub scenes have a certain frenetic quality that foreshadows the Crash (which, along with the Great Depression, might as well have not happened if this film were to be taken as truth), and Scorsese has great fun with the use of color, particularly when a plate arrives holding a steak and a dozen perfectly-spaced peas -- and the peas have an unmistakable blue tint, as they would if this had been a 1930's film subjected to colorization. Scorsese may be afraid to fly, but he certainly films flight as if he were in the cockpit, and it must have been excruciating to film the scene in which Hughes crashes his latest plane into a residential neighborhood, tearing off roofs and immolating just about everything in sight.

I'm not quite sure what it is that keeps THE AVIATOR from being the masterpiece Scorsese so clearly wants it to be. It may be just TOO big -- a film that crams so much energy, so much glamor, and so much motion into even its extensive 3-hour length that its hero -- a man less heroic than just someone with enough money to get his own way -- gets lost in all the noise. In 1988, Scorsese's doppelganger, Francis Ford Coppola, directed Tucker: The Man and His Dream, a much smaller film about automaker Preston Tucker, a similar, if smaller-scale maverick. By keeping that film focused, and getting a terrific performance out of Jeff Bridges, Coppola turned his hero into someone for whom the audience could cheer. A similar cheer for Howard Hughes, who was born on third base and always had enough money, in addition to will, to get his own way, is sort of like cheering for the Yankees. It's just too easy.

-- Jill Cozzi

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