Film review: ‘Amelia’ - Entertainment, Movies - Navy Times

Film review: ‘Amelia’

The adventure-crammed life of Amelia Earhart seems like rich raw material for a biopic. And casting the great two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank as Earhart seems like a double-down bet on a sure thing.

But while “Amelia” serves as a good primer on the aviation pioneer who vanished in 1937 while trying to circumnavigate the equator, it also shows how problematic biopics can be.

What “Amelia” gets right, it gets right in spectacular fashion, most notably the flying scenes.

The early days of flight remain irresistibly, thrillingly romantic — the courage and derring-do of the pilots, the flimsy planes seemingly held together by baling wire and duct tape, the primitive instruments that could lead a flyer aiming for Paris to end up in Ireland.

The script by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, based on two books (“East to the Dawn” by Susan Butler and “The Sound of Wings” by Mary S. Lovell), portrays Earhart as obsessed with shedding earthly chains for the open skies from her earliest memories as a young Kansas girl.

“Who wants a life imprisoned in safety?” she says in voiceover.

Her dream leads her to New York, where in 1928 she meets George Putnam (Richard Gere, still the silver fox at age 60), the A-list book publisher who steered Charles Lindbergh’s biography onto the bestseller lists and is now looking for a woman for whom he can do the same.

Not necessarily a woman pilot, however; he wants Earhart to become the first female to fly nonstop across the Atlantic — as a passenger. She reluctantly agrees, only because she knows it’s the stepping stone she needs to forge her own destiny.

And so she does, in 1932 becoming the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic, a feat that makes her the “most famous woman in America.”

Along the way, her bullheaded, almost hedonistic spirit — far ahead of its time, especially for a woman — zings Putnam’s heart, though he must work overtime to get her down the aisle.

“I’m not the marrying type,” she insists. When she finally says yes, she qualifies it by vowing that she won’t hold him to “any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly.”

She later proves it by having a passionate affair with West Point aeuronautics professor and future aviation industry pioneer Gene Vidal (Ewan MacGregor), father to a precocious lad named Gore.

It all leads up, of course, to her final fateful flight, on which she and navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) ascended into myth when they disappeared without a trace over the Pacific.

The problem with “Amelia” is that a 111-minute film can only briefly touch the highest highlights of a life as colorful as this, and the significant threads that are yanked and just as quickly cut short make the story feel frustratingly opaque.

Most important is the question of what first drove that Kansas girl to cast her gaze skyward and vault herself into the clouds in spite of the many constraints placed upon women of her era. The only clue comes late, when Earhart drops a brief reference to an alcoholic father who “let me down at every turn.”

Similarly, the film infers that Earhart chafed at Putnam’s insistence that she cash in on her fame by becoming a shill for luggage, clothes, cameras and even cigarettes, but this, too, gets a cursory 30-second treatment.

The script is also wrapped in a bubble that is rarely penetrated by the outside world. Most of the story takes place during the Great Depression, but its presence is felt only once, when Earhart sees bedraggled men on a soup-kitchen line and contrasts her gilded life with their far more desperate straits. But the twinge of guilt passes in a jiffy, and soon we’re back up in the clouds.

Yet in a way, the fact that the film can merely scratch the surface of its subject does serve a purpose — if nothing else, “Amelia” should effectively spur many viewers to delve further into the singular life of a true American original.