MOVIE REVIEW
'Amelia': Earhart bio pic is Swank-y but not very good
I didn’t know Amelia Earhart had freckles. After the wall-to-wall close-ups of Hilary Swank’s cosmetically freckled face in “Amelia,” it’s just about the only new thing you know for sure when the movie is over.
If I have to bend myself into a pretzel to be fair to “Amelia’s” tedium, I don’t mind, despite that it’s an almost comically old-fashioned movie about heroism. On the plus side: 1) this is, by any reckoning, one of the great American stories, long overdue at your neighborhood megaplex (it was previously a couple of movies made for TV); 2) if any story is about female empowerment, it’s this one; 3) some of the aerial photography is breathtaking; 4) the last 10 minutes, just before she is lost in the Pacific trying to fly around the world’s midriff, are genuinely suspenseful — suddenly good writing out of nowhere along with terrific filmmaking by director Mira Nair.
Everything else is a fatiguing botch. It’s a film that, technical fillips aside, could have been made in 1955, but even then it wouldn’t have been half as good as some careless rubbish starring Susan Hayward or Lana Turner.
As beautiful as some flight scenes are, there aren’t a fraction as many of them as there are closeups of Swank’s irresistibly freckled face. Swank is a rarity — an entirely deserved double Oscar winner for “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby.” In “Amelia,” however, which has to be accounted a vanity project, all she does is 1) smile with the middle American version of noblesse oblige; 2) show off a tiny bit of leg and 3) look pouty when things aren’t going well. Even June Allyson, in the 1950s, had more “nice girl” range than this.
Which, if you ask me, is a heck of a thing to do to Amelia Earhart, a great American figure — one whose story, bafflingly, has never before been told on this scale before.
She was heroism personified in the 1920s and ’30s — a slim, tousled, slacks-wearing Kansas girl who was the point woman in a movement to turn America into a nation comfortable in the air.
The movie begins with her as the first woman to cross the Atlantic (as a passenger, not Amelia’s cup of tea at all), goes into the creation of her as one of the reigning celebrities of her era and her complicated marriage to publisher/ manager G. P. Putnam and her supposed affair with aviation proponent Gene Vidal (father of Gore Vidal, the incomparable literary stylist and troublemaker, still very much with us and chortling at the age of 84).
Little preteen Gore is, in fact, a recurring character in the film, while Ewan McGregor, as a suave, impeccably dressed and coiffed version of his father, has a thing with Amelia, despite her famous marriage. Such as it is, that love triangle provides what drama there is before her ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937.
All right then, here’s Gore Vidal himself in his memoir “Point to Point Navigation”: “There have been a number of truly imaginative — not to mention dreadful — books about Amelia. One of them was the work of a woman who had convinced herself that Amelia was a nobody invented by a man of genius, the publicist and publisher George Palmer Putnam. Amelia’s marriage to G. P. was a wretched one. He kept her continually on tour, on view. At one point, she wanted to marry Gene [Vidal]. But he was not romantically inclined and saw her only as a friend, a comrade.”
In a current autobiographical memoir called “Snapshots in History’s Glare,” which is really just a long series of photo captions, Vidal speculates that Eleanor Roosevelt had a deep unrequited lesbian crush on Earhart (there’s an ever-so-tiny-and-oblique suggestion of that in the film, but if you didn’t know Vidal, you wouldn’t even guess).
One should, of course, never underestimate Vidal’s capacity to make mischief at the expense of the fatuous or the orthodox — nor his ability to do so with panache.
Even so, I must say, his version is infinitely more interesting than the tedious and thoroughly unbelievable heroine of this movie.
So eager is it to give America a heroine it has overlooked for far too long that it doesn’t really bother to make her a credible human being.
Personally, I think the real Amelia would have been delighted to fly over it as fast as possible on the way to somewhere else worth going to.•
AMELIA
Two and a half stars
STARRING: Hilary Swank, Richard Gere, Ewan McGregor, Cherry Jones
DIRECTOR: Mira Nair
RUNNING TIME: 111 minutes
RATING: PG for sensuality, language, thematic elements and smoking.
THE LOWDOWN: The story of Amelia Earhart, America’s most famous aviatrix.
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