‘Amelia’ Never Takes Flight

Written by Alejandro Riera | 22 October 2009

You would think that a life as thrilling, as groundbreaking, as adventurous as that of aviatrix Amelia Earhart would make for an equally wonderful, thrilling and exciting film, right? Think again. Because “Amelia,” Mira Nair, Don Ross and Anne Hamilton Phelan’s take on the life of the famous pilot who disappeared over the Pacific in 1837 while attempting to fly around the world, is…well, calling it mediocre would be rather generous. It’s just…blah. That Mira Nair, the director of such wonderful pictures as “Monsoon Wedding” and “The Namesake,” could be behind such a conventional, badly edited, awkwardly acted piece of filmmaking is the real surprise here.

Using Earhart’s final flight as a framing device, “Amelia” pretty much covers the key points in her life: from her first trip across the Atlantic as a passenger to her first flight solo along the same route, her creation of the 99, an all-female pilot organization and her romance and marriage to PR pioneer George Putnam (Richard Gere) and affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), father of novelist and intellectual Gore Vidal. There is no cause and effect to these sequences. They just happen. It’s almost as if Nair was following an instruction manual, rather than a script. Neither Nair nor the scriptwriters are capable of exploring what really drove this woman and how she influenced and was influenced by the times she lived in. There is a veiled and forced reference to the Great Depression but its inclusion feels almost insultingly gratuitous.

This leaves the actors with nothing to work with. No matter how many times Richard Gere may smile that million dollar smile, there is no energy, no life to his performance. As Amelia, Hilary Swank, one of the executive producers of the film, is so lost that she can never quite settle on an accent for her character. Sometimes she speaks with a Southern twang and sometimes with some bizarre concoction that sounds half Midwest, half East Coast. And Ewan McGregor offers one of his blandest performances as Vidal. Only Christopher Eccleston, as Fred Noonan, Amelia’s navigator on her ill-fated last trip, comes out shining. He offers a lesson of doing more with less, of turning a weak script into a gold mine. I just wished Eccleston and his agent would stop picking juicy roles in crappy movies (I mean, Chris, come on, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra”? You are better than that.)

But what’s even more unforgiveable given its subject matter, is that “Amelia” fails miserably to capture the thrill, the excitement, the sheer romance that aviation represented at the time. Compare the flying sequences of “Amelia” with those in Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator.” Scorsese delivered a visceral experience, thrusting the audience into the middle of the action, turning them into pilots and co-pilots. Nair shoots her flying sequence in a rather lyrical, lazy style. She seems to be taking the nature of flying for granted. There is no gumption, no guts, no glory. We never feel why aviation is Amelia’s calling the way it was for Howard Hughes in “The Aviator.” And we, in turn, respond to her accomplishments with a mere shrug of the shoulder, with indifference. Amelia Earhart deserves better.

CAFE'S RATING SYSTEM:
FOUR SHOTS: The perfect brew
THREE SHOTS: A decent brew
TWO SHOTS: A weak brew
ONE SHOT: Tastes like tar