Movie Review: Amelia

Supergenius note: Aaron Brown took this particular bullet for me. I owe him.

Amelia is the story of early American pilot Amelia Earhart, her rising celebrity, and her eventual ill-fated attempt to fly around the world. Well, it’s part of that story anyway. I saw the film at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, at an advance screening that happened to coincide with a new exhibit at the museum showcasing various Earhart memorabilia, letters, and historical information about her life. The exhibit was useful in that it put Earhart’s famous exploits into the context of her whole life, something the movie unfortunately doesn’t really do. It’s easy to imagine how the filmmakers could have broadened the scope of the film to include details of Earheart’s earlier years, but they didn’t. Too bad.

I went in with pretty mediocre expectations. I have to be in the mood to digest an historical biopic, and I wasn’t sure I was. Plus, it’s difficult to get too excited about a story when you already know how it ends. Finally, while both Hilary Swank and Richard Gere are fine actors, they have both been known to bore me with their choice of movie roles, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

In sum, Amelia was about what I thought it might be, and very much what I feared it would be — a basically mediocre film, certainly not terrible, but not particularly riveting. I thought it was well-acted enough, but the script was bland and forgettable. There is literally no memorable dialogue in the film whatsoever. But thankfully, this means there’s nothing cringeworthy either. I should point out that the studio had apparently sent over some upgraded sound equipment to the Museum of Flight just for this showing, and something wasn’t working quite right — I found it difficult to hear some of the dialogue because it sounded like the actors were speaking too close to a microphone. So maybe some of the dialogue was actually quite profound beneath all the inaudible banter I couldn’t quite make out. Probably not though.

The film was more interestingly photographed than it was written. Lots of beautiful shots from the plane. The Irish coastline looks nice from the air, and I totally want to fly over the Gambia now and watch herds of giraffe and gazelles prance around, just as Earhart does. One criticism though: If you’re going to film a daytime scene in New Guinea in the rain, make sure the sky isn’t unrealistically bright, sunny and cloudless. Otherwise, the audience will start thinking about the studio’s rain machine, rather than the drama unfolding onscreen.

Amelia Earhart is a feminist icon for many reasons, but I hadn’t previously been aware that her marriage to George P. Putnam (Gere) was characterized by an openness that was quite liberal for her time. Famously, Earhart wrote her fiance to clarify that she didn’t want either of them to be bound by any “medieval code of faithfulness.” And the film explores her deviations from that code a little bit, though it does so tastefully enough that the PG rating doesn’t seem obviously unwarranted. I wondered at one point if the filmmakers were taking some creative license here, but when I revisited the exhibit after the screening, I confirmed that Earhart’s casual attitude toward fidelity within her marriage was in fact the real deal.

How do you film the last few minutes of Earhart’s life, when no one really knows what they were like, but everyone knows how the story ends? I don’t envy the filmmakers here, but all in all I thought they did a pretty decent job. The tension builds as both those on the plane and those on the ground realize there is no more time for Earhart to reach Howland Island before her plane runs out of fuel. Earhart has a navigator on board with her, but the two don’t speak about their predicament. Instead, Swank’s eyes tell the story. A look of moderate angst about her troubles turns to a look of marked fear of failure as time is running out. Finallly, we see her look of resignation as Earhart realizes she will shortly meet an untimely demise, and there is nothing she can do about it.

If you’re a movie junkie and you’re inclined to find Earhart’s life interesting, by all means see this picture. But if you’re saving your pennies for something epic and life-changing, skip it. Go see Zombieland.