Movie Review - Amelia

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replying the story in its archived form does not constitute a re-publiccation of the story.

If A&E’s Biography and the Lifetime Movie Network had a baby, Amelia would be that baby.  Starring Hilary Swank as famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart, the film is a painfully earnest biopic that fancies itself Oscar-worthy.  It’s not. 

The movie is filled with overwritten, stilted dialog that no doubt looks great on the page but sounds utterly ridiculous when coming from the mouths of actual human beings.  Furthermore, most of the actors use accents and cadences that make them sound as if they just stepped out of an “old timey” newsreel.  Earhart was born and raised in Kansas…so why does Swank speak with a New England inflection that makes her sound like Katherine Hepburn? 

The film is the sort of sepia-toned, hazy focused movie that Hollywood doesn’t make any more…and for good reason if this film is any indication.  The story is told using a framing device (shamelessly lifted from the Lindbergh biopic The Spirit of St. Louis) in which Amelia, during her final flight attempting to circumnavigate the globe, reflects on how she got to this point.  Earhart’s life is handled with kid gloves thereby virtually guaranteeing a tedious theatrical experience.  By all accounts she was an aviator of questionable talents; more adept at publicity than she ever was at piloting.  She was often admonished by contemporaries as competent but hardly proficient enough to be tackling many of the extraordinary feats she was routinely attempting.  Her accomplishments were, within her industry, widely believed to be as much the product of luck as they were of skill.  The film touches on the skeptics but rejects them outright.  Clearly she is a proto-feminist that’s meant to be revered regardless of the truth.  Ironically, this trait isn’t necessarily a character flaw.  After all, the history books are full of men who have bluffed their way to success.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that Earhart was a fascinatingly complex figure.  In a note that was hand delivered to her husband George Putnam (Richard Gere) on their wedding day, she wrote, "I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil (sic) code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly."  And that’s a promise she kept.  The film briefly focuses on an extramarital affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), father of literary giant Gore Vidal.  But her rumored bisexuality is addressed (and dismissed) with one line of dialog.  Likewise, her husband’s willingness to suppress female pilots who might steal her spotlight is given short shrift.  So what we have here is a polyamorous, possibly bisexual, female pilot of dubious aptitude taking needless risks in an effort to feed her ego and prop-up her endorsements and book deals.  That sounds like a hell of a movie…I wished they had made it.

The final fifteen-minutes of the movie recreate, with apparently painstaking precision, the final attempts at radio communication between Earhart and the refueling rendezvous.  Given the notorious result of that flight, I don’t feel I’m spoiling the film to reveal that, despite repeated attempts, they are never able to properly communicate.  It’s a ceaselessly tedious scene that quickly devolves into the cinematic equivalent of watching someone with spotty cell phone reception.  (And the Oscar goes to…T-Mobile!)  Ultimately the film does serve as reminder of a remarkable achievement.  Unfortunately for the filmmakers, the achievement it reminds us of isn’t Ameila Earhart’s but that of Billy Wilder…the writer and director of the similarly themed (and far superior) The Spirit of St. Louis. 

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being The Spirit of St. Louis and 1 being Soul Plane, Amelia gets a 4.

This article also has 1 video attached to it.