The Aviator Review

The color is doing argumentative work here. Robert Richardson graded the first hour to imitate two-strip Technicolor, so greens read as blue and the peas on a dinner plate look faintly poisoned, then opened the palette into three-strip saturation once the film reaches 1935. Few biopics use their own photography as a clock.

Scorsese stages the Hell's Angels dogfights and the Beverly Hills crash with real physical menace, and Thelma Schoonmaker cuts the crash so that the house seems to come apart around the man inside it. Cate Blanchett attempts something harder than impersonation with Katharine Hepburn and finds the defensive clatter underneath the voice.

DiCaprio is strongest in the compulsive rituals, the repeated phrases, the bottled milk, the hands held too long under scalding water. Yet at 170 minutes the film still marches through the biopic checklist, and the Senate hearing plays as straight vindication after hours spent refusing to flatter him. Kate Beckinsale's Ava Gardner never becomes a person, only the next stage in a sequence of women, and the last act mistakes a single triumphant flight for a resolution.