Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/5/09
Biopics are inherently dicey.
Sure, your subject undoubtedly did a bunch of stuff that was interesting,
otherwise you wouldn't be making the movie. But whether there are
second acts to American lives or not, they are extremely difficult to shove
into any kind of satisfying structure. And the temptation to make
someone's life “say” something leads to the temptation to twist the facts
we came to see into something that supports a thesis rather than a story.
Though buoyed by predictably strong performances from Hilary Swank and
Richard Gere, Mira Nair's new biopic of Amelia Earhart manages to be both
too taken with and not interested enough in its' subject. Amelia
is a good jumping-off point for viewers to learn about the aviatrix's (far
more interesting) true story, but its' a dog wagged by its' tail:
nobody would be making a movie about a life that was really as dull as
the one depicted here.
The film covers the period
of Earhart's national prominence, from 1928-37. Amelia (Hilary Swank)
interviews for a job posted by George Putnam (Richard Gere), who's looking
for a woman to become the first to fly across the Atlantic, albeit as a
glorified passenger. He and the plane's owner have plans for a tie-in
book deal and considerable national exposure. She gets the job and
her refusal to fail saves the trip on more than one occasion, leading to
fame, exposure, and marriage to Putnam, who puts the Earhart name on everything
from luggage to waffle irons. Both to maintain her iconic status
and prove herself worthy of it, Earhart starts to set real records, flying
the Atlantic solo and advancing the cause of female aviators in competition
and as a public speaker. She also becomes involved with the early
FAA and too intimately involved with its' head Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor).
Trying to shake off the affair and salvage her marriage, she also embarks
on the ultimate test of her flying skills, circumnavigating the globe with
the help of navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston). It is,
of course, a journey they will never complete.
Like Titanic before
it, Amelia is a movie whose ending is known to 99.9% of ticket buyers
on their way in. What matters more is the setup, that opportunity
to fill in the details of her early fame that have slipped from popular
knowledge in the seven decades since her disappearance. Here, writers
Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan seem to have taken the odd tact of walking
us through the bullet points of her life but minimizing the coolest stuff
about them (I say “seem to” because both writers have publicly distanced
themselves from the finished product). For example, there's the 1929
Women's Air Derby race in which the real-life Earhart delayed takeoff to
race to the wreckage of a friend's plane and drag her out, only to finish
third because of the time she lost going to her aid. The movie shows
us the race and Amelia finishing third, but omits the part that actually
helped build her legend. The movie looks askance at her commercial
endorsements while sidestepping the fact that she helped design many of
those products. Ultimately, the film's vision is a deflating one
of a feisty girl who just wanted to fly while stupid men kept making her
shill for Lucky Strikes, have affairs with them, and miss Howland Island.
In short, it's trying to sell us an Amelia Earhart who was an icon rather
than a person.
But it's hard to even say
what she's to be an icon of since Nair's film in no way summons a sense
of a 20's and 30's world where women enjoyed few opportunities for what
we'd now call a career. In fact, in 115 minutes, not a single ounce
of chauvinism is displayed. We overhear some drunken pilots saying
Earhart can't fly at a time when no one yet knows who she is and Vidal
makes passing reference to the notion that the media's been critical of
her endorsements. Those two moments aside, it's one long Amelia lovefest,
hardly the way to suggest any struggle or triumph went on. It seems
that flying at the time was ridiculously dangerous by modern standards,
but Nair is too married to flight as a metaphor for the soaring spirit
of female empowerment to make the airborne sequences in any way bruising
or exciting.
Still, the skeleton of a
quality biopic is here because Amelia Earhart was a very modern celebrity:
created by the media, credited with things she hadn't done and then spending
the rest of her life trying to make reality catch up with perception, all
the while branching out into every marketing opportunity she could get
her hands on. Swank takes bits and pieces of a real woman clearly
more of a feminist trailblazer than the movie will allow this one to be
(keeping her last name upon marriage in real life was a lot bigger deal
than refusing to say “and obey” during the wedding vows, as she does on
film), gives her a dusting of 30's movie glamor (OK, more than a dusting
of Katherine Hepburn), and succeeds in making the result feel like an improbably
real person. Gere feels more and more at home in period pieces as
he ages, and here once again embodies the soul of 1930's showmanship.
The two characters make a great couple, so much so that the lack of sparks
between Swank and McGregor makes the Earhart-Vidal affair seem even less
motivated than it could possibly have been. Eccleston, locked in
a life and death struggle with his English accent, has some solid moments
as Noonan, although he's mostly left fumbling with props as if to suggest
“I know I had a job on this plane, navi-something...” during the climactic
unpleasantness. Cherry Jones' excellent Elenore Roosevelt and Mia
Wasikowska's spirited Elinor Smith make things interesting during their
brief time on screen.
A quick perusal of Earhart's
Wikipedia biography turns up all manner of missed opportunities.
This was a woman who, upon deciding to become a pilot, designed her own
iconic flight suit and then slept in it for days so it would look like
she already was what she set out to be; a woman who battled the lingering
effects of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic her entire life, and, as I mentioned,
the kind of woman who'd lose a race to drag a friend out of the wreckage
of her plane. In short, somebody pretty interesting. But Amelia's
filmmakers let all that slide, fearful that the little girls in the audience
would be insufficiently inspired the real Earhart. Instead, they'll
be bored silly. |
