Biopics are a notoriously tricky proposition, mostly because lives tend to be chaotic and incomplete, where things are left un-said and feelings remain hurt. But movies can’t afford to let such delicacies of emotion go un-resolved and so movies 'complete’ what life can’t. So the conventional movie biography is, essentially, about tidying things up.
Amelia Earhart, then, as a movie subject, is a particularly inconvenient mess. For starters she died young in relatively mysterious circumstances. Famous as the first woman to cross the Atlantic solo, Earhart (Hilary Swank) and her navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) were lost in 1937 trying to fly around the world, when their plane disappeared without trace over the Pacific. A prototypical feminist, Earhart vigorously campaigned on women’s issues at a time when such a stand, by such a public figure, was not only ill-advised but dangerous. Married to the publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere) Earhart recommended what was once quaintly called 'open-marriage’ and had an affair with the founder of TWA, Gene Vidal (Ewan Macgregor). There were suggestions of bi-sexuality, too. Then there is the action and passion for flying; Was Earhart an adrenaline junkie? Was she genuinely fearless or was there a death-wish component?
All in all she is a complex figure, a Kansas farm-girl with a wholesome face and ferociously dangerous energy. Mira Nair’s film of this intriguing life is the movie equivalent of a pop-up book with all the anxiety, danger and angst inherent in the material airbrushed away. It even looks like a travel commercial; photographed by the brilliant Stuart Dryburgh in chocolate-y tones that never suggest for a moment the danger and excitement of flying, its vision of the 30s is beautiful, glistening, well-clothed and not remotely convincing. Perhaps that’s instructive because the film seems to be more a fantasy about the choices presented by celebrity than the life of a famous aviatrix.
Swank is credited as executive producer on the project. It’s tempting to read the films depiction of Earhart as a young idealist who is constantly offered up material choices that only diminish her talents, while making her more famous without enriching them as a neat analogy for the arc of a self-serious movie actor of principles. This isn’t to suggest that such a tone is in itself in poor taste or belittling (to talent and subject). But Amelia makes its heroine’s actions and decisions so easy. She is almost always right and righteous and likable, even especially when she is causing great pain to others. Even the love triangle of Vidal-Earhart-Putnam is put out as a polite slip of good manners rather than a necessary answer to the urgings of lust and romance.
Still, within the shaky and anodyne atmosphere of the film the actors are fine; Gere projects decency and vulnerability, and Macgregor impersonates sauveness and sexual savvy well.
Swank is strong; she has a persona here that is part swagger/part free-spirit but still, it is a strangely thin role mainly because we never really get a sense of the inner drive of the character. Nair and screenwriters Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan re-sort to the old technique of using voice-over extracts from her diary (self-consciously lofty stuff about not wanting to be 'earth-bound’) but it doesn’t tell us much. Amelia remains like those characters found in old live action Disney biopic romances, heroic and absolutely remote.
