AMELIA

“AMELIA” (Hillary Swank & Richard Gere)

This should have been titled “Amelia & George: A Bland, Lifeless, Loveless Story”
What we learn about Amelia Earhart during this biopic is that she was a fraud, an adulterer & a publicity whore.
Apparently Amelia accomplished one single feat in her lifetime (Crossing the Atlantic solo) & turned it into a lifetime ‘gig’ as a corporate shill. The only ‘interesting’ event that happened to this woman was the way she died.
I didn’t like the movie from the beginning because they open by showing Amelia with her navigator during their fateful flight. Earhart writes him a note. He reads it & chuckles... We, the viewing audience don’t get to see what is written. I was a bit peeved – why aren’t we allowed in on the joke? That’s simply poor filmmaking & writing. Then I thought – they’ll probably let us know what she wrote when time catches up to that moment in the film (Which bounces back & forth from telling Amelia’s life story to scenes from her final flight) but they don’t.
It was like they wanted to show the audience that Amelia had a sense of humor, but we’re not clever enough to think of something humorous for her to have written.
If Hillary Swank even gets nominated for this performance, it will be a joke (Or as it looks like it’s going to turn out, the weakest year for films in this century) Both she and co-star Richard Gere (as husband/PR man George Putnam) are as unimpressive as one can imagine. I pinpointed the problem with the fact that they seemed to try so hard to get their accents down they forgot to develop their characters – especially Gere, but we expect him to give weak performances; Swank should apologize for her lazy portrayal. If only they asked Amy Adams to reprise HER Amelia (from the insipid ‘Night at the Museum 2’ in which she was the only redeeming fixture) this film might not have been so boring.
The only thing that works here is if you’re a scenery buff – there is plenty of aerial shots of cool sunsets & storms & banking over waterfalls that if you’re the type that gets a thrill from looking out a window at crap, you’ll enjoy. But it doesn’t help matters when they have Amelia speaking such unctuous lines as ‘the stars seem to be near enough to touch’. . . No, they don’t! They’re millions of miles away, you nimrod.
Amelia initially makes a name for herself by being a passenger on a cross Atlantic flight. She turns this ‘feat’ into a full time occupation (Thanks to George) by becoming the abovementioned ‘Publicity whore’. She fails to win an ‘air race’ to promote women aviators & then, after marrying George, she has sex with a much younger more handsome suitor in Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor) whose greatest accomplishment was in fathering Gore (Shown here as a fraidy cat little boy who has been duped into believing Ms. Earhart HAS actually accomplished something)
When they finally show her one great feat, which she tells George she wants to attempt BECAUSE she is a fraud – the cross Atlantic trip is shown in a 2 minute clip in which Amelia takes off, encounters turbulence & then lands in Paris... er, no, I guess it was Scotland (or was it Wales?)
To subtract from the believability of this landing scene, they show ‘newsreel footage’ of Amelia shaking hands with the baffled sheepherder. Now, in today’s society it’s not that far of a stretch to believe that someone just happened to have a camcorder handy to record this ‘historic’ though wayward event, but in the
mid-1930’s I don’t imagine too many shepherds wandering the rolling hills of Scotland (or Wales) had videotaping devices handy just in case an American female pilot should happen to land amongst their flock...
A fraud, a cheating spouse & someone who would promote any product for money whether she approved of it or not – that’s how the heroine in this film is portrayed. Despite Amelia’s comments that she whores herself out for publicity just so she can fly, doesn’t dismiss the fact that she still whores herself out for publicity.
And I almost forgot to mention the amount of chemistry Swank & Gere produce onscreen... that’s because there isn’t any.