I appreciate the work and vision here, but a lot of this didn’t work for me. The Aerochrome-like colour timing was excessive. I get the vibe, but instead of coming across as authentic, it just felt like Scorsese used (and over-used) digital colour grading for the first time.
A lot of the story beats don’t work for me either. It’s very hard to tell the story of any man’s life in three hours, but Scorsese has done it well in the past — and with much more apparent joy than he does here. Scorsese makes Hughes sympathetic, but also sort of boring.
The film feels like a modern riff on the Citizen Kane story — at times, I felt like DiCaprio was channeling Welles. Both play rich maniacs with a lot of money and excessive pride. I got the feeling Scorsese was inviting the comparison between these films.
But Hughes seems to me like he has more in common with Edison and Steve Jobs. I want to see him be more mercurial, and more obsessive — from all accounts, that’s how I imagine him to be.
In the end, this feels like prestige studio fodder from Scorsese — a studio obligation, rather than a Scorsese dream, and that’s too bad. It’s Scorsese though, so as much as I’m complaining, I was also enraptured.
That being said, I was genuinely surprised by appearances from Alan Alda, Adam Scott, and Ian Holm. That was fun. (Same with the long list of other cameos, really.) Huge fan of Cate Blanchett and her accent in this too. Has she ever aged?