Hilary Swank in Amelia
In Mira Nair's pretty but disappointing biopic Amelia, there's a scene in which Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) laments the shallow nature of the two questions repeatedly posed by her adoring public. It's not long after the 1928 transatlantic flight that made her a household name, and she says all anyone wants to know is "Where are you going next?" and "What did you wear?"
It's a gentle lament, because the Earhart brought to the screen by Nair and Swank is a gracious lady, magnanimous and humble. She quotes Carl Sandburg, takes care to enthusiastically greet the little people while making history — "Well, hello, sheep!" she says, descending from the cockpit in an Irish meadow — and, above all, beams beatifically at the world at large.
But the same complaint about superficiality can be lodged against Amelia. We learn a lot about where Earhart went and what she wore — behold the sumptuous caramel-colored leather jumpsuit! But the woman herself remains tantalizingly out of our grasp, and not just because she, her navigator and their plane vanished over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, leaving no trace but spurring hundreds of theories about their fate. The movie dutifully covers the high points and a few details you didn't learn in grade school — including Earhart's great passion for Gore Vidal's father and how much of her celebrity was contrived and manipulated — but it leaves the odd impression of being merely a very long trailer for a film you'd actually love to see.
Part of that problem lies with Swank. She is undeniably the most physically right American actress to play Earhart. Everything about her looks the part: the tousled hair, the toothy smile, that slim but womanly physique. Swank could have been handed a leather jacket and stepped right into the cockpit — although the painted-on freckles are a nice touch — and this intense resemblance unfairly vests us in the notion that Earhart will spring to life onscreen.
Instead, you see the reanimation of various well-known images — like Earhart standing on the wing of her plane — by an actress giving a very studied and careful but wooden performance. Screenwriters Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan (Gorillas in the Mist) appear to have gobbled up every quotable line ever attributed to Earhart and then regurgitated it into a script. The results may be mostly accurate (both East to the Dawn, Susan Butler's 1997 biography, and Mary S. Lovell's earlier The Sound of Wings are credited as the basis for the screenplay), but they veer between the stilted and the cheesy.
"Why does a man ride a horse?" Earhart responds when George Putnam (Richard Gere) — her future manager, publisher and husband — asks why she wants to fly. When he first proposes marriage, she demurs, telling him, "I want to be free, George, to be a vagabond of the air." To a bleary-eyed pilot who questions her decision to take to the skies in dicey weather, she says, "I'm as serious as you are hungover." Earhart may well have said all these things, but you wish the filmmakers had been bold enough to let their heroine sound like a real person now and again. Surely on one of those long flights, Earhart whined at least once about having to urinate through a funnel. The closest she comes to complaining is when Putnam is renting her out to sell everything from luggage to waffle irons, a zippy little montage that reminds you how much fun Nair (Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake) can have behind the camera.
Ghosts of Aviation
And what potential for humanizing material there is in Earhart's unconventional love life. On her wedding day, she gave Putnam a letter that included this line, reprinted in East to the Dawn: "I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly." In the movie, she writes with the groom snoozing behind her, then reads it out loud. Languishing against the pillows, hand over eyes, Putnam mutters that such brutal words are tolerable only coming from her. Gere struggles to sell the melodrama, and we struggle to buy the logic. Why did she say yes again?
Then there's her friendship and apparent long-standing affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), a West Point flying instructor who became head of the aeronautics branch of the Department of Commerce during the Roosevelt Administration, thanks largely to Earhart's advocacy with Eleanor Roosevelt (a jolly Cherry Jones). Gore Vidal, a child at the time, confirmed to Butler much of the relationship, sharing details like Earhart's habit of wearing Gene's underwear while aloft (helpful with that midair funnel). With tidbits like this, who needs flashbacks to ticker-tape parades? But both romances are bloodless. Even when Earhart breaks up with Vidal (which she may not have done in real life), it's about as heated as a tussle over the last cucumber sandwich. The movie insists that Earhart make peace with her marriage before going off to die, as if we wouldn't be able to mourn the demise of an active adulterer. Even this most unconventional of heroines has to be conventional in the end.
Sensibly, the screenwriters and Nair aren't coy about Earhart's likely fate. There are no absurd conspiracy theories involving the Japanese or suggestions of her making safe landing on some deserted island — just communication blunders and furrowed brows (a Swank specialty), and then she and the plane are gone, vanished in the typical way of small planes running out of fuel over a vast ocean. It's not even particularly sad until Nair rolls the documentary footage of the real Earhart. There, grainy and distant, is the "ghost of aviation," as Joni Mitchell called her in the 1976 song "Amelia." Earhart still has the power to haunt us, even after, as Mitchell imagined it, her life became a travelogue. This Amelia, she's just a false alarm.