From the first gee-whiz smile at her press conference to the soaring shots of her plane clipping clouds over lush plains, Amelia is the Great American Red-eye. You want to get on the flight, but sleeping through it is the primary expectation, because you know as soon as it's over, you get to wake up fresh and with a purpose—like never seeing Amelia again.
Alas, I stayed awake, if only through sheer determination, something the film wants to express with the title character but mistake it with bullheadedness. When the film is not being annoying, it's little more than good background noise as I count the petals on my couch's floral patterns. I got to 62 before cabin fever set in.
Even the framing of the film is an unimaginative bore. Amelia Earhart (Hillary Swank) and her trusty navigator (Christopher Eccleston) takes off on a round-the-globe flight, and while they do this, we flashback to moments in Amelia's life, guided by her ghostly voice. Specifically, we see how the woman in her seesaws between her grayed husband George Putnam (Richard Gere) and the dashing young pilot Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor).
Swank's slavish performance, watching with the benefit of hindsight, is even more hilarious in its Oscar-glory hunger, knowing it was thoroughly ignored. Her qualification in nabbing the role looks as though it hinged on her striking resemblance to the real Amelie Earhart and a career attraction to spunky females. At least it's a lively character played with some measure of personality, compared to her husband, who's just Richard Gere in a hat.
Mira Nair is an efficient director whose strength as a filmmaker is often in finding those precious moments worth noting within the sweeping scope of the characters' lives, a trait that has stayed true from Salaam Bombay! to The Namesake, but I guess even her keen eye lost Earhart on the radar. I can't say that Amelia Earhart is a boring subject—her life story obviously insists on the opposite—but this film makes her adventures indistinguishable from that of a fretting farmgirl-turn-housecat. How you can do that with a character who shatters expectations as she conquers the space between continents, allegedly a trailblazer for her gender, is nigh-unthinkable. She might as well have been aviating in the kitchen.
Amelia is the kind of biographical tedium that of course starts with tween Amelia running through a field, staring glitter-eyed at a crop duster cutting through a John Ford-ian sky, her adult voiceover writing her destiny. "When I saw that little plane, it lifted me up off the Kansas prairie," she says. "I had to fly." So she does, and very little can stop her from doing so. Not society, not men, not even a remotely interesting development.
To really know and understand Amelia Earhart is to know why she flies, but the film doesn't translate that for the audience beyond hack poetic ramblings of freedom of movement in the sky. There's no indication of the rush of excitement that supposedly comes with piloting in the plane sequences, there are only endless aerial postcard shots accompanied by a swelling score that doesn't know what the hell else to do, while Swank's excess narration reads the paper's horoscope section. "Who wants a life imprisoned in safety?" Who cares? It's a feat in itself that the people involved could get through this material with a straight face, but I guess that's all they managed to do.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
It would be a gross oversight for the special features on the disc to be more interesting than the movie. This Blu-ray edition comes close, if not for one feature: a collection of seven Movietone News Reels of the real Amelia, which gives you a reference point on how close Hillary Swank's impression is. They're archival, of course, and not a feature produced for the disc.
For that, you get the standards. Deleted scenes, one "making of" featurette, one on who Amelia Earhart was, and then two focused on her planes. The "Making Amelia" one proves just how loose of a grasp this biopic has on its subject, as you'll see Nair and the cast spout the typical "everybody's great, this is inspiring" sentiments without any specific insight, making it a superfluous behind-the-scenes look. The plane-centric features fare better because they're more technical, and if you're interested in plane designs, it's a passable watch.
The Blu-ray edition also comes with a second disc containing a digital copy of the film. In case you need to take this movie on a plane ride with you.
"Amelia" is on sale February 2, 2010 and is rated PG. Biopic, Drama. Directed by Mira Nair. Written by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan. Starring Ewan McGregor, Richard Gere, Hillary Swank, Christopher Eccleston, Joe Anderson.
