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Howard Hughes meets the Senate
The Aviator, released in 2004 and directed by Martin Scorsese, is a sweeping portrait of Howard Hughes, the aviator, filmmaker, and industrialist whose genius and obsessive-compulsive disorder shaped, and eventually consumed, his extraordinary life. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hughes from his early days as a Hollywood producer in the late 1920s through his triumphs in aviation and his harrowing decline in the late 1940s. It is a large, lavish film, full of period detail, flying sequences, and a remarkable ensemble cast. Among that ensemble, Alan Alda gives one of the film’s most memorable supporting performances as Senator Owen Brewster, a Maine Republican who becomes Hughes’s most dangerous political enemy.
Brewster, whose full name was Ralph Owen Brewster, was a real historical figure, and Alda plays him not as a cartoon villain, but as a formidable, polished, and utterly ruthless politician. In the film, Brewster is in the pocket of Pan American Airways, Hughes’s great rival in commercial aviation. Pan Am’s founder, Juan Trippe, played by Alec Baldwin, wants to preserve his airline’s monopoly on overseas routes, and Brewster is his man in Washington. When Hughes’s Trans World Airlines threatens that monopoly, Brewster launches a Senate investigation into Hughes’s wartime contracts, accusing him of war profiteering and waste. The investigation is presented as a search for truth. In the film, as in history, it is also a weapon, designed to destroy Hughes’s reputation and to force him out of commercial aviation.
Alda’s Brewster is chilling because he is so respectable. He wears the right suit, he speaks in the measured tones of a senator, and he smiles as he asks questions that are designed to humiliate. He does not shout. He does not need to. He has the power of the Senate behind him, and he knows how to use a hearing room as a stage. When he questions Hughes, he is not seeking information. He is performing for the cameras, for his colleagues, and for Trippe, who is watching from the sidelines. Alda plays that performance with a quiet, patrician menace that is very different from the warm, funny men he usually played. It is a reminder that Alda, for all his likeability, could play authority at its coldest.
The hearing: Hughes on trial, Brewster in control
The Senate hearing is the climax of The Aviator, and Alda is at the centre of it. Hughes, by this point in the story, is a man in the grip of his illness. He is terrified of germs, he repeats phrases, he cannot sit still, and he has been hiding from the world in screening rooms and hotel suites. Brewster expects to break him. He expects Hughes to stammer, to lose his temper, to confirm every rumour about his instability. Instead, Hughes rises to the occasion. DiCaprio plays the hearing as a moment of extraordinary courage, in which Hughes, dirty, unshaven, and shaking, finds a clarity he has not had for years and turns the investigation back on his accusers. He accuses Brewster, in open session, of being in Trippe’s pocket, and he does it with a precision that leaves the committee stunned.
Alda’s reaction in that scene is superb. Brewster does not explode. He does not lose his composure in the way a lesser villain would. He tightens, he smiles a thinner smile, and he tries to regain control of a room that is slipping away from him. It is a small, precise piece of acting, and it makes Brewster more believable as a politician. Real power, Alda suggests, does not panic. It waits, it regroups, and it finds another way to win, even when it has lost the argument in public. That is why Brewster remains frightening even after Hughes’s triumph. He has not been defeated. He has merely been embarrassed, and embarrassment, for a man like Brewster, is a reason to try harder next time.
The historical Brewster did, in fact, chair a Senate investigation into Hughes, and Hughes did, in fact, defend himself with remarkable skill. Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan compress and dramatise that history, but they keep its essence: a contest between a brilliant, troubled innovator and a political system that could be bought, or at least rented, by established interests. Alda’s performance anchors the political half of that contest. Without a convincing Brewster, Hughes’s victory would feel empty. With Alda’s Brewster, it feels earned, because the audience understands what Hughes was up against: not a fool, but a skilled, connected, and determined adversary.
An Oscar nomination, late and deserved
For Alda, the role of Brewster brought his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, at the age of 68, more than forty years after his film debut. It was a fitting recognition for a career that had often been undervalued by the film industry, which had tended to think of Alda as a television star who also made films, rather than as a film actor in his own right. Scorsese, who cast him after admiring his work for decades, gave him a role that used his intelligence, his voice, and his authority, and Alda repaid that trust with a performance of great discipline. He does not try to steal scenes from DiCaprio. He builds a character who makes DiCaprio’s scenes matter more.
The nomination also marked a late-career renaissance for Alda. In the years that followed, he would play Arnold Vinick in The West Wing, appear in Bridge of Spies and Marriage Story, and continue to work on stage and in science communication. But Brewster remains a high point, a role that showed younger audiences, who might have known Alda only as a familiar face from television, that he was a serious dramatic actor with a range that extended far beyond comedy. His Brewster is not warm, not funny, and not sympathetic, and that is precisely why it is so impressive. Alda had spent a career making audiences like him. As Brewster, he made them dislike him, and he did it without ever raising his voice.
Watch The Aviator for its flying sequences and for DiCaprio’s extraordinary central performance, and then watch it again for Alda. Notice how still he is in the hearing room, how he uses a pause before answering, and how his politeness becomes a weapon. It is a masterclass in playing power quietly, and it remains the most distinguished supporting performance of Alda’s film career, a fitting capstone to a journey that began in a Kentucky moonshine story and ended, for a time, in the corridors of the United States Senate.