I was very excited when I went to the theater to see The Aviator in 2004. Martin Scorsese has long been my favorite living filmmaker and this was going to be at least one part his tribute to classic Hollywood, with Jude Law as Errol Flynn, Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, and most prominently Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn. Blanchett was getting a lot of Oscar buzz and she is one of the best actresses on the planet and I knew she’d be great. So I was particularly disappointed when she came on screen, she and DiCaprio's Howard Hughes go golfing, and at one point she says "You're deaf, and I sweat. Aren't we a fine pair of misfits?" and I just thought “oh that sucks, she’s really fake. I don’t believe her in this role. I guess Hepburn is just too big an icon to believably portray.” I got used to her performance as the movie went on, but that feeling did stick with me. Upon rewatches of the movie, my mind changed.
The next year The Aviator played constantly on whatever movie channel I had at the time and I got sucked into watching it over and over again. It was during this time that I realized how genius Blanchett’s performance in the movie was. In those first scenes, of she and Hughes playing golf together, Blanchett isn’t being fake, Hepburn is. Hepburn is putting on a front to an aggressive man pursuing her. She’s barely listening to him, and they’re not really connecting. But it’s not a fault of the actress playing Hepburn, but of Hepburn herself. As the movie goes on, we see Hepburn let her guard down more and more in front of Hughes, until she’s one of his most trusted allies.
We also see the two of them visit her family in Connecticut and Hepburn falls into the kind of fakery that her family traffics in. None of them are listening to each other, they’re all making declarations and shouting their opinions and it overwhelms Hughes until he gets angry and leaves. He gets angry at her as well, telling her that she's being like a different person around them. She tells him that “the only real Kate, is your Kate” but in those first scenes I didn’t understand that at that point she isn’t “his Kate” and is being the fake person she so often is around people.
Blanchett fooled me just like Hepburn fooled Hughes. This isn’t a fake performance but one of our best actors doing some of her best work playing a fake person. Later, when she talks to Hughes of her brothers suicide or when they laugh together and tease each other, or when they break up, it’s real. Hughes even calls her out during their breakup, telling her to "stop acting." And at that point we can tell too, if we're paying attention. You can feel that Hepburn is acting, not being real. But when Hepburn was being fake, Blanchett was so brilliant that I forgot she was playing a character and thought she was giving a fake performance. I am so happy that I was wrong, and Blanchett really helps elevate The Aviator into becoming easily the most rewatchable Scorsese movie for me.
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