There are certain mysteries that place a stronghold on the world’s imagination. The existence (or lack thereof) of the Bermuda Triangle, Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and UFOs are primary among these questions, inducing shivers in those who would like to speculate about the possibility of strange life forms on our fair planet.
And then there is a different sort of mystery, one in which we know someone really existed and then suddenly, simply disappeared without a trace. The famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart was one of those people, the first woman to fly across an ocean who went on to attempt being the first woman to fly around the earth when her plane encountered a series of problems and likely – but not definitively – crashed, with her never to be found again.
Earhart’s story has been the subject of numerous books, TV specials and at least one TV miniseries, but she’s never received a big-budget biopic until now. In the new film “Amelia,” two-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank tries to bring Earhart and her impressive accomplishments to life, but is hamstrung by the fact that the act of flying a plane long-distance – even if one is setting records – has a limited visual excitement.
Combined with a cliched score by Gabriel Yared that veers wildly in tone from epic to tinkling-piano tragedy, and a script by veteran writers Anna Hamilton Phelan (“Gorillas in the Mist”) and Ron Bass (“Rain Man”) that has surprisingly limited narrative drive and dialogue that often sounds like it’s coming out of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which people talk in clipped, snappy tones simply because it’s the Roaring Twenties, “Amelia” never achieves liftoff as an entertaining picture.
The film covers the decade between the time she captured the world’s attention for the first female transatlantic flight in 1928 until her attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1938. The problem is that Swank’s Earhart never undergoes a major dramatic arc or change in her life; she’s tough as nails from start to finish, with only occasional glimpses of vulnerability. Combined with the fact that everyone knows she disappears in the end, there’s really nothing to hold an audience’s attention span. The whole thing plays as one of those movies that’s not necessarily good, but rather good for you.
Swank not only stars but co-executive produced the film, clearly seeing it as yet another iconic tough-gal role to complement her Oscar-winning turns in “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby.” But where those films gave her intense performances from Oscar-nominated Chloe Sevigny in “Boys” and Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in “Baby,” “Amelia” provides her with strangely reserved, almost milquetoast performances from Richard Gere and Ewan McGregor – as her husband, publishing titan George Putnam, and her lover, pilot Gene Vidal, respectively.
In the end, the film marks a disappointingly conventional step back by world-class director Mira Nair from her powerful, compelling identity-driven 2007 film “The Namesake,” in which an Indian-American college student was torn between establishing his own unique American identity and honoring the heritage of his immigrant parents. Earhart never shows the same sense of conflict, but rather crashes and burns in a sea of indifference.