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Amelia Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG (for some sensuality, language, thematic elements and smoking) Genre: Drama Theater release: October 23, 2009 by Fox Searchlight Directed by: Mira Nair Runtime: 1 hour 51 minutes Cast: Hilary Swank (Amelia Earhart), Richard Gere (George Putnam), Ewan McGregor (Gene Vidal), Christopher Eccleston (Fred Noonan) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

The press called her a "lady pilot," but Amelia Earhart called herself a "tramp flyer." She seems to have preferred "flyer" to "pilot"; perhaps it was just a manner of speech, or perhaps it was the sky she cared about more than the airplane, the act of flying rather than the mechanics of manning an aircraft. The other word she liked was "vagabonding." As imagined in Amelia, Mira Nair's handsome biopic, Earhart craves freedom above all: "no borders, only horizons."

I came away from Amelia wanting to read the books on which it professes to be based, Susan Butler's East to the Dawn and Mary S. Lovell's The Sound of Wings. Mission accomplished? Yes and no. To the extent that the film elevates Earhart's profile and sends curious viewers to biographies and websites to learn more, Nair and company, and Earhart advocates generally, may be pleased.

Will the film itself please Earhart fans? Hard to say. Amelia piques my curiosity more than it satisfies it. Not knowing much about Earhart, I'm surprised at how little the film surprised me. I want to read the books to find the surprises the movie left out. I found the movie a decent enough take, though I suspect the film may be subject to a law of inverse relationship of knowledge to enjoyment: The more you know about Earhart, the less satisfied you may be with the film.

Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhart

But it's worth seeing, perhaps, just to see Hilary Swank as Earhart. It seems incomprehensible that Amelia is the first big-screen biopic of the pioneering feminist aviator, but the very idea of Swank as Earhart is so obviously right that it's hard to imagine anyone else carrying an Earhart biopic. (I haven't seen the 1994 TV movie starring Diane Keaton, but looks aside, Keaton seems all wrong. Incidentally, Amy Adams did not play Amelia Earhart in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian; she played an animated waxwork representation of Earhart, just as Robin Williams doesn't play the real Teddy Roosevelt.)

Swank not only looks like Earhart, her whole persona—matter of fact, down to earth, blunt, driven, but not larger than life—all seem ideally suited to the Earhart mythos. Her smile, her presence, her attitude, everything seems right. Amelia has garnered obvious comparisons to Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (deleted scenes from which included Jane Lynch as Earhart). The Aviator is probably a more interesting movie, but DiCaprio never embodied Howard Hughes the way Swank embodies Earhart.

It is harder to see Richard Gere as publishing magnate George P. Putnam, Earhart's promoter and publisher, and eventually lover and husband, or Ewan MacGregor as Army pilot Gene Vidal, with whom Amelia worked in various capacities and with whom the film proposes she had an extramarital fling. In part this may be because unlike Amelia, Putnam and Vidal (the father of Gore Vidal, who appears as a boy) don't have the same public personas which Gere and MacGregor might or might not approximate—an issue only compounded by the comparative familiarity of the two actors.

Richard Gere as George Putnam

Gere does persuasively pull off Putnam's gradual shift from professional interest in Amelia, to affection, to infatuation, to unconditional love. Amelia's need for freedom without boundaries makes her wary of George's attentions: "I can't endure even a beautiful cage," she says.

When she finally does accept his proposal of marriage, it is with the explicit proviso—in writing—that she will not hold him "to a medieval code of faithfulness," nor consider herself bound to such a code. She even insists on a sort of one-year trial marriage, a forward-thinking prenuptial agreement that George accepts reluctantly, only because he wants Amelia on whatever terms he can get her. George believes that he will be able to make Earhart happy; the movie suggests that he succeeds, though it takes her some time to realize this.

The commercial side of Amelia Earhart is one of the more intriguing things about the story. Amelia indicates that Amelia Earhart only became Amelia Earhart because Putnam wanted a woman flyer—preferably a physically attractive one—for publicity purposes. Amelia's initial flight over the Atlantic was a stunt, and she herself was a passenger, which needled her so much that she eventually repeated the flight solo, becoming only the second person to do so after Lindburgh.

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