There’s no better way to land an Academy Award than by playing a famous dead person. So the troubled life and times of America’s first female aviator presents a story overflowing with promise. Too bad it's unfulfilled.
There’s no better way to land an Academy Award than by playing a famous dead person. So the troubled life and times of America’s first female aviator presents a story overflowing with promise. Amelia Earhart was a restless, fascinating character, pioneering her way through gender barriers and breaking all sorts of boundaries with reckless abandon.
Earhart’s tale, familiar to all, begs for an iconoclastic telling—a crazy adventure turning genre formulas and preconceived notions on their heads.
Instead, director Mira Nair has mustered up the safest, most boring movie imaginable. It’s Our Lady Of The Sacred Transcontinental Flight, except duller than one could ever possibly dream, given the source material. The movie feels like one of my old Catholic Catechism books about the lives of the saints, but considerably less interesting.
What an odd accident of fate that an actress of Hilary Swank’s limited range has won two Academy Awards already, and is thus the most esteemed of her generation without displaying even the slightest bit of range. She has exactly one mode for all her roles, a gee-whiz, wide-open sense of tomboy wonder that when, contrasted with impending doom, a la Boys Don’t Cry or Million Dollar Baby, allows a natural pathos to take root. In Amelia, we already know what’s eventually going to happen, so maybe she should try bringing a little texture or excitement to the role besides “aw shucks”?
Swank makes Amelia Earhart dull, which is no small feat given how considerable this American’s life really was. By all accounts, Earheart was a prickly, horny number, carrying on with her husband (Richard Gere in his sad Unfaithful cuckold mode, playing her hubby G.W. Putnam) and Ewan McGregor’s dashing Gene Vidal, thus allowing the movie to stop cold for his toddler son to complain about how much he hates being named “Gore.”
Yeah, it’s that kind of movie where the audience is congratulated and flattered for recognizing futuristic historical signposts, even when they’re planted like landmines.
Swank and Gere are stuck doing false, crazy 1930s movie accents that can’t help but alienate the audience. She always sounds like a bad Katharine Hepburn pull-string doll, and he sounds eerily like what happens whenever TiVo plays your Turner Classic Movies reruns at the wrong speed.
The whole movie reeks of taste—a lot of lavish moving parts buffed and finessed until there isn’t any life left in the thing. Eventually I just wanted Ms. Earhart to go crash her damn plane so I could go home already. D+
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