RATING:

After seeing Amelia, you can only assume one of two things: That Amelia Earhart herself was an insipid, uninspiring woman or that filmmaker Mira Nair just blew it.

I think we can all draw the same conclusion.

How did this film go so far afoul? You have a talented director (I loved Nair’s The Namesake), a perfectly cast Hilary Swank as Earhart, and the kind of subject matter that seems destined to land on critic’s Top 10 lists.

But Nair made the classic mistake. She was so concerned with mimesis—yes, Swank looks like Earhart, the aviator-chic clothing is spiffy, and the planes look sufficiently rickety—that she didn’t bother with story. You can’t just present us with the details of Earhart’s life. You have to show us what drove her, what gave her lift off.

Instead, Earhart is depicted as an earnest, cheery lady who simply wants to fly. She wants to be free, she says over and over again. She wants to soar like a bird, roam like the buffalo. Oh, how I wish I was making this up.

“It was a night of stars. Of tropical loveliness,” Earhart intones from the sky.

“A fairyland of beauty lay below and above me,” she says later, as I tried not to laugh out loud.
(She’s a pilot folks, not a poet.)

The film gives us two equally uninspiring romances—one between Earhart and her doting publicist/publisher husband George Putnam (Rirchard Gere); the other, an affair between Earhart and fellow pilot Gene Vidal (Ewan MacGregor). (If the story is to be believed, it turns out that 7-year-old Gore Vidal was afraid of tigers. And yes, folks, that is quite possibly the most interesting revelation of the film.)

Amelia is slick, handsomely mounted and really just a colossal dud. Oh, and I’ll go ahead and ruin the ending for you now—they never find the plane.