This isn’t quite a review, I guess, but a warning.
I have an aviatrix fetish. Women flying biplanes = instant hotness for me. I should be the target audience for this.
Except how the fuck do you do an Amelia Earhart movie and have it skip most of her flying? This should have been called AMELIA AND GEORGE, since it focuses almost exclusively on the relationship between Amelia (Hilary Swank) and George Putnam (Richard Gere), her publicist-turned-husband. It basically begins at the moment she meets him.
There’s one early scene of her flying a biplane (pictured). After that, essentially anything interesting she did is handled via old newsreel footage and newspaper headlines flying at the screen. The 1976 NBC TV movie starring Susan Clark showed us all the action, yet a modern movie can’t?
What’s worse is how it sets up stuff that never pays off. A rivalry is established between Amelia and younger up-and-comer Elinor Smith (Mia Wasikowska). They’re gonna face off in a race of women fliers. Putnam tells Smith to throw the race. Will she? Won’t she? What would Amelia think? Great set-up for an action sequence…so of course all we get is a brief newsreel saying the race happened, some women crashed, and Amelia came in third. That’s IT.
It’s also key to the plot that Amelia’s dad was an alcoholic, which affects how she deals with boozers later in life. Naturally, we never actually see her dad, ever. The only flashbacks to her childhood involve her riding a horse and looking at a plane in the sky. If you’re going there anyway, why not show dad, since he, y’know, MATTERS?
But hey, should we blame director Mira Nair for not making the movie I want, but the one she wants? I can blame her for the stuff that doesn’t pay off. Why is Amelia so reckless and driven? What does she love about flying? By not showing her beginnings, we miss this. I know there was footage shot of Swank wing-walking, but that doesn’t make it into the movie. The focus here is on the fact that she wanted an open marriage, and so there’s a whole pointless side plot about Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor). Gene is the father of Gore Vidal, which is clear because they say his name aloud more than a dozen times, gratuitously. Not that he affects the plot one iota, but someone wanted us to know damn well that Gore Vidal met Amelia Earhart as a kid.
So the whole movie is about how Amelia loves George but doesn’t want to be tied down by him. Then it reenacts every single communication from her final flight, when a discreet handling would work just as well.
Swank is fine in the role; no probs with that. She needed a better movie.
Put the NBC version (image below) out on DVD. I want that one. This can go to hell.
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