Amelia Cinema Review

On the plus side this film has some gorgeous cinematography, courtesy of Stuart Dryburgh, especial the aerial shots accompanying Amelia Earhart’s last round-the-world flight, and some fabulous 30’s vintage aeroplanes, and good performances from Hilary Swank, Richard Gere (ageing very well, thank you) and Christopher Eccleston. On the debit side some of the dialogue and direction are a bit clunky, especially in the first half, and it doesn’t quite get inside the woman who became a myth. But overall this is an enjoyable and interesting account of America’s celebrity female flyer, whose passion culminated in taking one risk too many.

The film recreates well the sheer danger of flying tiny aeroplanes across huge distances, and, through newsreels, the excitement shared by millions. Amelia, thanks to publisher and then husband George Putnam, was marketed as effectively as any brand we know today, and endorsed everything from cigarettes (she didn’t smoke) to cameras. She was a part of brash, unapologetic capitalism, and when that went belly-up in 1929 she is shown to empathise with those in the soup kitchen lines. However her activism was much more directed towards enabling the achievement of women. She temporarily takes up with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor) who is about to become Roosevelt’s Director of Air Commerce, and there are a couple of touching scenes with the young Gore. (Who, one learns from his book of essays Armaggedon?, flew a plane himself at the age of 10, and writes “Amelia Earhart was very much a part of my life. She wrote poetry; and encouraged me to write…. It was assumed that she had what were then called Sapphic tendencies.”) She certainly had a somewhat boyish look, but the film presents Amelia more as a proto-feminist whose singular determination took precedence over emotional entanglements. But it also suggests, in the tense and well-constructed finale, that had she lived beyond her forty years a domestic life with George might have been just the thing. Perhaps more poetry would have lifted this to great movie altitude, but it’s pretty good all the same.