By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: October 23, 2009
Amelia Earhart, the American aviator who disappeared somewhere over the Pacific in 1937 while trying to become the first woman to fly around the globe, didn’t wear bodices, as far as I can tell from the new biographical movie starring Hilary Swank. If Earhart had, it’s a good bet that Richard Gere, who plays her sensitive, supportive, quietly suffering husband, George Palmer Putnam (G. P.), would have ripped or, rather, politely removed an unmentionable or two amid the civilized yearning and the surging, swelling music.
Romance is in the air in “Amelia,” or at least in the score, which works hard to inject some emotional coloring into the proceedings. The music screams (sobs) 1940s big-screen melodramatic excess and beautiful suffering.
Alas, excesses of any pleasurable kind are absent from this exasperatingly dull production. The director Mira Nair, whose only qualification appears to be that she’s a woman who has made others films about and with women (“Mississippi Masala,” “Vanity Fair”), keeps a tidy screen — it’s all very neat and carefully scrubbed. I don’t recall a single dented automobile or a fissure of real feeling etched into a face. Bathed in golden light, Amelia and G. P. are as pretty as a framed picture and as inert.
Earhart became a celebrity during her two decades in the air, setting records and grabbing headlines. In 1928 she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. She wasn’t allowed to pilot the plane, forced instead to watch the world pass by from the rear. (“I was just baggage.”) Four years later she took the controls to become the first woman to fly solo across the pond. She then tried to circle the globe: “Like previous flights, I am undertaking this one solely because I want to, and because I feel that women now and then have to do things to show what women can do.” And then there was this: “I am going for the fun. Can you think of a better reason?”
Well, no, I can’t, though fun — along with nonpharmaceutical kicks and just the pleasures that come with being alive — doesn’t often factor into recent film biographies, especially of stars, perhaps because filmmakers think we need tears to wash down the achievements.
No triumph goes unpunished in “Ray” or “Walk the Line.” An American film that does suggest that bliss can figure in remarkable lives is “I’m Not There,” Todd Haynes’s fractured portrait of Bob Dylan, though even here the highest highs are in the filmmaking itself. Gus Van Sant’s “Milk,” about the gay-rights advocate Harvey Milk, conveys its subject’s joy, but that exuberance is the beatific prelude to martyrdom.
Earhart wasn’t a martyr. She vanished doing what she loved best: touching the clouds. At the time she was 39, seemingly content in her marriage or at peace with its compromises, and publicly adored. An argument can be made that her death was a catastrophe — a husband lost a wife and the world a feminist inspiration — but “Amelia” won’t or can’t rise to the tragic occasion. The filmmakers spend so much time turning her into a dopey romantic figure that they never give her the animating, vital will or even much of a personality that might explain how a Kansas tomboy turned Boston social worker took to the skies and then, through her deeds and words, encouraged other women to chart their own courses.
She did marry, at 33. Ms. Nair recreates the simple ceremony — like many biopic directors, she dutifully spins all the greatest hits — and shares Earhart’s remarkable prenuptial letter to G. P. “I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly,” Earhart wrote. “Please let us not interfere with the other’s work or play.” The movie, like some biographies, reveals that some of that play involved an aviation entrepreneur, Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor, smiley and, perhaps, self-consciously artificial), whose young son, a future writer named Gore (William Cuddy), asked her to marry his father. This affair, though, scarcely registers before she’s safely back in the marital fold.
The emphasis on her marriage domesticates Earhart and also turns her into a bore. Instead of digging deep into the complexities of her character (as Mr. Haynes does with Mr. Dylan), the filmmakers cram Earhart’s life — or at least its presumptive highlights — into a biographical template. In this mold, familiar from many Hollywood and Hollywood-inspired movies, the thickness of life is thinned until it’s as manageable and as easy to shoot and to sell as a bulleted checklist. Amelia flies. Amelia meets G. P. Amelia flies again. Amelia marries G. P. Amelia flies once more. And so forth and so on, with the requisite period details (cue the jazz music and scratchy black-and-white newsreels) adding visual interest.
With her rangy figure, Ms. Swank fills Earhart’s coveralls and leather jackets nicely. But there’s little to the performance other than the actress’s natural earnestness and smiles so enormous, persistent and consuming that the rest of Earhart soon fades, much like the Cheshire Cat. As usual, Mr. Gere holds your attention with beauty and a screen presence so recessive that it creates its own gravitational pull.
The actors don’t make a persuasive fit, despite all their long stares and infernal smiling. (The movie is a more effective testament to the triumphs of American dentistry than to Earhart or aviation.) It’s hard to imagine anyone, other than satirists, doing anything with the puerile, sometimes risible dialogue. The screenwriters, Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, give Earhart a voice-over even as they forget her voice.
“Amelia” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). She smokes, she flies and most likely dies.
AMELIA
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Mira Nair; written by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, based on the books “East to the Dawn” by Susan Butler and “The Sound of Wings” by Mary S. Lovell; director of photography, Stuart Dryburgh; edited by Allyson C. Johnson and Lee Percy; music by Gabriel Yared; production designer, Stephanie Carroll; produced by Ted Waitt, Kevin Hyman and Lydia Dean Pilcher; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes.
WITH: Hilary Swank (Amelia Earhart), Richard Gere (George Palmer Putnam), Ewan McGregor (Gene Vidal), William Cuddy (Gore Vidal), Christopher Eccleston (Fred Noonan), Joe Anderson (Bill), Cherry Jones (Eleanor Roosevelt) and Mia Wasikowska (Elinor Smith).
