Scrolling through Amazon Prime Video reminds you both of the number of options available to watch on the platform, and also of how difficult it can be to actually pick something. One of the best ways to decide what to watch is to see which movies will be leaving the streamer soon.
The Aviator is one of the great movies of the 2000s, and it’s worth checking out before it leaves Prime Video. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, the legendary entrepreneur and filmmaker who dated many of the most famous women in the world in the 1930s and 40s, even as he grappled with severe OCD. Here are three reasons you should check it out:
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It’s the moment when Leonardo DiCaprio went from movie star to actor
By the time we got to The Aviator, Leonardo DiCaprio was already one of the most famous men in Hollywood. He’d been in Titanic and he’d already worked with Martin Scorsese on Gangs of New York. The Aviator, though, is the moment when DiCaprio fully unlocked everything that he is capable of as an actor. It remains one of his very best performances. As Hughes, DiCaprio is both mannered and vulnerable, but the way he depicts Hughes’s OCD never feels anything other than lived in and fully embodied. Hughes was a difficult man to understand, but in DiCapiro’s hands, he feels like a complicated but ultimately coherent person.
Cate Blanchett won an Oscar for a reason
Playing one of the most decorated actresses in the history of Hollywood is no small task, but Cate Blanchett proved that she was more than up to it. She plays Katherine Hepburn, one of Hughes’s love interests in the film. Calling her simply a love interest is a huge undersell, though. As Hepburn, Blanchett creates a fiery, independent woman who is driving the relationship far more than Hughes ever seems to be. Although she’s not a perfect visual match for Hepburn (who obviously has a lengthy record of onscreen appearances), Blanchett is so precise in basically everything else that she justifiably won an Oscar for her performance.
It covers a lot of time without ever feeling predictable
One of the ultimate curses of the biopic is that they can feel incredibly safe, conventional, and boring. The Aviator is never that, though, in part because the man at its center was none of those things. This is a movie that covers a huge swath of Hughes’s life, including a famous period where he locked himself in a screening room for weeks and began bottling his own urine, without ever seeming like a conventional biopic. Instead, The Aviator feels entirely distinct, a movie about a man so singular that, even if you try to make his life into a narrative, it’s the kind of narrative that few other lives had.
You can watch The Aviator on Amazon Prime Video.
