The Aviator

The Aviator is many things: It's a film with some great performances, stellar direction, and a compelling story to boot. It has some wonderfully staged effects sequences, gorgeous cinematography, meticulous production design, and an overwhelming sense, throughout the film, that you are in great hands for the next 2 1/2 hours of the story. The Aviator is many things... but it is definitely not the Best Picture of the year. It's not even Scorsese's best picture he's ever done.
I guess the best thing to do is to point out the good things and the bad things about the picture:

GOOD:

• #1: Scorsese. He's brilliant here. It's a picture (because it's so bold and big) in which you would think that time and time again you'd have these moments one after the other where the film would almost scream "Look at me...I'm Scorsese!" The movie hardly has any of those moments. But this is also part of its downfall...
• #2: DiCaprio. Leo is great in this. I seriously remember the first second he came on screen, and seeing him in this role, and thinking to myself, if this is how he's gonna play it the whole movie, then this is going to be great. Needless to say, he does. The best performance he's given since What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and it probably rivals it, which says something about how great it is. I truly believe that if this wasn't Jamie Foxx Year, DiCaprio would have an Oscar in his hands.
• #3: I got "lost" in the movie during periods of the film... Hardly ever happens to me. I truly forgot I was in a movie theater, or that I was watching a Scorsese directed piece, or who the actors were... I just really wanted to know what was going to happen next. When the movie hit its stride, you're right there along for the ride.
• #4: John C. Reilly kicks ass.

BAD:

• #1: The script. I know, it's not exactly the best thing to have this on the bad list, but it just has to be there. Luckily DiCaprio was there to give insight into the character, because the script sure doesn't...we get almost no information about his past or his family, or his childhood, or where his manic personality came from. After a great half hour, the narrative takes a huge nose dive in the middle act, going way too slow for the wee bit that is going on in the story at that point. A good 20 mins could have been cut from this picture. The good news though: the film comes roaring back in the last half hour.
• Scorsese forgets he's himself, where it counts. Granted, he did something a little different in this picture: he hardly moved the camera at all, using a static frame a lot, and overall just doing things quite different from how we know him. The problem is, during points in the film in which the movie needs some sort of burst of energy, in the form of some crazy camera move or a tracking shot, we don't get it. One thing I did notice was that instead of using a big camera move, in some scenes, particularly dialogue scenes, he used some quick cutting to build up momentum.
• This is quite rare: Instead of the film not being focused enough, it was almost too focused. I kept thinking of Kundun over and over again while watching this film. Kundun was this big Scorsese film from a few years ago that failed in what it tried to do because it was too focused, and wasn't quite sure what it wanted to do. The Aviator is the complete opposite. It knows exactly what it's trying to do and say and convey. And that is eventually its undoing. Ray, another film about a person who discovers new things and breaks new boundaries, in every scene, surges with this energy that something is about to be discovered, something is about to be changed, etc. The Aviator doesn't create that feeling. It doesn't feel as if the person in the film has really created anything that's fresh, revolutionary, etc. It's like the filmmakers are so focused on how to convey the outcome of Howard Hughes, they've forgotten to convey the excitement of the new ideas that was present along the way.

So, it's not a bad film. It's not a great film. It even scoots past "good" on occasion, riding that line between "You'll remember it next year" and "You'll remember it in 10 years."