Reviewed by Anne Wollenberg
Stars Hilary Swank, Richard Gere, Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston, Joe Anderson, Cherry Jones, Mia Wasikowska, Aaron Abrams, Dylan Roberts, Elizabeth Shepherd
Written by Ron Bass & Anna Hamilton Phelan
Certification UK PG | US PG
Runtime 111 minutes
Directed by Mira Nair
The ingredients are decent enough: a pioneering woman, namely Amelia Earhart, who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. A huge dollop of real-life drama and intrigue: Earhart broke records and gender barriers, and then disappeared while flying over the South Pacific in 1937 without anyone ever discovering what became of her. An eager, naïve woman with sky-high dreams who is plunged into sudden celebrity, gets stuck in a lukewarm marriage and is conflicted by the shameless commercialism needed to fund her flying exploits, with some fabulous costumes to boot.
But this drama-come-biopic, which draws on not one but two Earhart biographies, never actually gets off the ground. As Amelia, Swank is boring, wooden and irritating. If she was aiming for a subtle, restrained performance, then the result is anything but. Earhart is supposed to be an intriguing, flawed heroine, caught between her nice but not terribly exciting marriage to publisher George Puttnam (Gere) and the passionate spark she finds with aeronautics professor Gene Vidal (McGregor). Instead she is simply boring and lifeless, which unfortunately seems to rub off on everyone else, too – alcoholic navigator Eccleston’s attempts to sound American (assuming that’s what it was supposed to be) are particularly excruciating and Swank’s rural Kansas accent isn’t much better.
Earhart’s passion for flight is undeniable, and yet it never quite translates onto the screen. Instead, she comes across like a whining child rather than any kind of pioneering feminist, incapable of comprehending that she can’t just fly all the time without someone having to pay for it. Where is the passion, the excitement, the adventure? Even when the film tries to ramp up the dramatic tension, it fails miserably – when Earhart’s plane loses radio contact, for example, there are far too many different shots of people saying things into the radio and failing to get a response.
There’s a scene where Swank’s Earhart tells a crowd: “I fly for the fun.” Well, where is it then? The New York Post called Amelia “a lazy coffee-table book of a movie” but that was far too kind. It’s more like the table, and however stylish the vintage planes and period outfits may look, there’s nothing to stop it from sinking.