Amelia Review

Posted by Erik Luers on 10.31.2009

Amelia conquered the skies, but not always the screen.....


Hilary Swank ... Amelia Earhart
Richard Gere ... George Putnam
Ewan McGregor ... Gene Vidal
Christopher Eccleston ... Fred Noonan
Joe Anderson ... Bill
Cherry Jones ... Eleanor Roosevelt










The biggest problem facing the Mira Nair film, Amelia, is that it is constantly in awe of itself. The real aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, was a cheerful, inspiring American icon back in the hustle and bustle 1920s flappers period, and our filmmakers know this all too well. They are also big on reminding us of her cultural significance at every chance they get. As an in depth biopic, Amelia is superficial Hollywood fluff, with big name actors playing dress up and putting on funny inauthentic accents to prove that they have done their exhausting actorly homework. As a piece of expensive Hollywood visual eye candy, Amelia is pretty expansive and attractive. It has breathtaking art direction, beautiful CGI, and costumes that are skillfully designed and crafted. You can see the money building on the screen.

The movie is a shallow work, and it doesn’t provide any new information on Earhart’s life (it actually gives us less than we knew coming in), but it is a harmless look at an American figure viewed as saint. Everyone in the film is in love with her for some reason or another, and we’re supposed to be too. Why? Because she’s always smiling and brightly lit; she has an invisible halo shining ever so insignificantly above her head. If she wanted to, she could cure disease, turn rain into sunshine, and morph sand into water.

The film’s screenplay, by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, follows Amelia’s life thoroughly, and that’s really all there is to say about it. It doesn’t follow her life closely or specifically exactly, but it sort of serves as a checklist of her many accomplishments. It doesn’t let us know why they’re so important — titles come on screen specifying time and date, indicating that they must be noteworthy for something — but we figure, if the film is pointing this day out, it must have a worthy reason. Sometimes it does (like when Amelia meets George Putnam, her future husband, for the first time in New York City) and most other times, it doesn’t (such as when Nair notes the arrival of the Great Depression by showing one man on the street lining up for a cup of hot soup).

One problem with the film’s narrative structure is that it opens up with Amelia’s tragic final voyage. It then abandons it, gets to the beginning of her life, and continues along chronologically from there, give or take some unnecessary cross cutting between her present situation and that ominous final trip. The film feels severely fragmented as a result, and the editing choice disrupts whatever flow the movie was trying to achieve in the first place. Amelia feels like a glossy clip show, but one in which you’re not always sure of which parts are important and which aren't.

I must also ask for an end to an annoying and tired biopic trait: showing the subject as a young child when it has nothing to do with the rest of the story. Here, we see young Amelia running through the field (and once, galloping on an energetic horse) in awe of the aircrafts above her. Flying was her life, we are to understand. But why? The brief childhood moments seem desperate and make Earhart’s life seem offensively simple. As a girl (and later in her voiceover narration, as a woman), Amelia keeps reminding us of how much she loves to fly. The movie tells us so much that it often forgets to show us her humanity and skill. We are lead to believe that Amelia became a pilot because she didn’t know how to do anything else.

The film implies that, throughout her life, Amelia had problems with drunk men, i.e. her father and two plane partners shown in the movie. She had a dislike for men with too much alcohol in their systems and, at one moment towards the end of the film, we are to suspect that one of them will be responsible for her death. This is intriguing, certainly, but nothing comes of it. The man apologizes for his drunkenness and merrily we roll along. Why wasn't Earhart's anger ever spoken about? She certainly had a lot of pain in her heart, and I wish the film would have told us why. Nair could have had a young Amelia subplot or flashback with meaning and subtext, but we're never allowed to know too much about her past, and that's unfortunate.

And yet, while the critics have salvaged this movie left and right, it is not, in this writer’s opinion, without merit. There are action sequences that are exciting and expertly put together. Take a look at Amelia’s flight across the Atlantic for an example of this. As she flies higher and higher into the sky, above the clouds and towards the sparkling stars, the wings of her aircraft become engulfed in thick ice. Uh oh. Panicking, Amelia quickly drives the plane downwards, and the ice quickly breaks off. Everyone can breathe a welcomed sigh of relief. Obviously, the clouds and the ice and the sky (and probably the plane itself) are hi-tech, computerized images, but it looks good enough to be mistaken (or at least substituted) for the real thing. Nair directs this short sequence like a taut thriller, and for once, the movie doesn’t feel completely predetermined.

I know what you fine folks are thinking. You want to know how the movie ends, how it gets around the fact that we still don’t know what happened to Earhart and her flying partner on the tragic day where she lost contact with the world on shore. How do you end a story with an ending that's unknown? Amelia goes as far as a movie based on her life could go, relying more on speculation than concrete facts (of which there are few). Like most standard biopics, the film concludes with on screen text describing what is known about Earhart’s last days and then shows us some footage of the real woman. Not smart. I wanted to see a movie about this woman and not Hilary Swank playing her.

Yes, the performances are a mixed bag. Two time Academy Award winner, Hilary Swank, gives a very confused and unsure performance as our leading lady, focusing on getting the voice right but not much else. She smiles a lot but it feels lifeless and lacking depth, as if nothing more than cheap mimicry. She doesn't gel with the other actors in the film. Her Amelia seems self contained and secluded (almost autistic), cut off from others in the world. Richard Gere, as the meek husband, is considerably better, giving us a neutered version of his take on Billy Flynn. Oh, and before I forget, Ewan McGregor shows up as Gene Vidal, but the actor doesn't do anything here but play solemn. Solemn is as solemn does and he does it okay, I suppose. The boy that plays his son, Gore Vidal (William Cuddy), is given an awkward introduction, but he is an effective and sincere child actor. Is that what the young Gore Vidal was really like? Let the debate begin.

Amelia is not a particularly involving movie, and we never get to know who Earhart really was or what motivated her. She appears as a caricature of herself. It's disappointing because all of the pieces are there, but they're in the wrong locations. You can sense a better movie trying desperately to break free, but Nair keeps it tucked away in order to keep the film rolling along before anything can resonate. We keep cutting back to news footage with phony voiceovers from the 20s, and after a while, we can't keep up. Luckily, the film is shiny enough to keep our eyes interested. It gives us cavities of the pupils. Let's say that it has the taste of bubble gum that's been chewed up for a few minutes too long.

The 411: Amelia is neither the definitive biopic of Ms. Earhart's life nor a complete out and out cinematic disaster. If it sounds like this I'm going soft on this movie, perhaps it's because critical reception prepared me to expect the worst. This movie is not terrible. It's fluff, but nice looking fluff. It doesn't offer any answers, but it likes asking a lot of questions. Some are red herrings, some are worthwhile. In being too vague, the film does something very commendable: it makes us want to read up more on the woman's life. Some school kids, instead of reading the books, watch the movie. This may inspire the reverse.

Final Score:  6.0   [ Average ]