Amelia (2009)

Show. Don’t tell. This cardinal rule of storytelling should be an easy one for anyone working in film. How much telling can you possibly do when your medium is moving pictures? If you’re director Mira Nair and the film is Amelia, the answer is entirely too much.

Through Amelia’s contrived voiceovers – in Hilary Swank’s painfully affected Kansas accent – we’re told that Amelia Earhart inherited her adventurous spirit from her alcoholic father, whom we’re never shown. We’re told that she had the love affair of a lifetime with publicist husband George P. Putnam, which we’re never shown. And we’re told – quite often and unsubtly – that she’s a feminist hero for the ages, but again are never shown enough to fully understand the reason why.

Amelia opens with promise as a young woman – impeccably costumed in the perfect 1920s drop-waist dress, pearls, and cloche hat – walks into the office of a brusque, older man to sign up for a never-before-attempted mission. The woman is Amelia Earhart (a too-skinny Hilary Swank); the man is publicist George P. Putnam (Richard Gere); the mission: to become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.

The film focuses on the decade or so between the legendary aviatrix’s 1928 transatlantic flight as a passenger and her disappearance while trying to circumnavigate the globe in 1937. Along the way, she becomes the first woman to fly across the pond solo, Putnam’s wife, aviation pioneer Gene Vidal’s (Ewan McGregor) mistress, and a national darling.

We know all this is true because Nair gives us flashes of newspaper headlines and grainy black-and-white archival footage to prove that it is. But, working from a script by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, she doesn’t give us enough of a picture of Amelia to make us really care. To explain Amelia’s headstrong determination and tireless drive, Nair hints at the flier’s tomboy girlhood (at least that’s what I think the 30 seconds of a young Amelia riding a horse through a wheat field is supposed to indicate). Right. Because all tomboys grow up to change the world.

Meanwhile, the story of the real-life Putnam-Earhart-Vidal love triangle doesn’t heat up until an hour and 15 minutes into the 111-minute movie…and those flames (well, they’re hardly even sparks) are doused almost as quickly as they appear. A single, stolen elevator kiss, a few extended glances, and a jealous phone call during which Putnam reads a love poem steamier than anything Nair ever puts onscreen, and the triangle is neatly resolved.

Wait. This is the same Mira Nair who directed Mississippi Masala and Kama Sutra?

That there isn’t a single ounce of chemistry between Swank and either Gere or McGregor certainly doesn’t help. Perhaps – and this is when Gloria Steinem comes personally to take away my feminist card – if someone had put a little lip gloss or rouge on the frighteningly masculine leading lady to go along with those painted-on freckles, there might have been some hope.

Alas, any hope for rescuing this dull and woefully incomplete biopic begins and ends with the last scenes of the movie. It is in these final moments that the film finally stops talking at its audience and allows us to see the acting abilities for which Swank has received two Academy Awards. But, like Amelia’s distress calls over the Pacific, it comes too late to prevent a soggy landing.