If you don't know who Amelia is nor how her last flight ended, then you need to 1. not read this if you don't like spoilers, and 2. pick up a history book and read about Amelia Earhart before I slap you!! Seriously.
*end spoiler alert*
I have a bit of a flying-fetish. Call it a fancy, a fascination. Planes are cool. Looking at the world from up high, from the sky, gives you such a refreshing perspective of the Earth. And planes make that view possible.
Amelia wasn’t the greatest female pilot, not in her day, not ever. She was very accomplished, and well known, still. She was likable, smart, spoke her mind, ‘news-worthy.’ Would she be as known now if she had not disappeared on her last flight? Fame seems to follow failure more than success, so arguably, if she had landed as planned, she might have been forgotten in history textbooks along with many of the other early aviators. This is the price of fame. And I don’t think she’s probably happy about, wherever she is: living in infamy for failing.
On the plus side, the major accomplishments of Amelia Earhart:
The 16th woman to receive a pilot’s license in May ’23
The first woman to fly (as a passanger) across the atlantic in ’28
Second person (and first woman) to fly solo across the atlantic May 21, ‘32
First woman to solo nonstop coast to coast August 24-25, ‘32
First person to fly solo nonstop from Hawaii to California in ’35
Now keep in mind that the Kitty Hawk flight occurred when Amelia was 6 years old in 1903. Men had been trying to get a plane in the air for years, and centuries before that trying to fly in general. December 17, 1903. The Wright Brothers. 59 seconds. 852 feet. A successful flight. On May 21, 1927, Lucky Lindy landed in France having flown the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight. Just about a decade later, radio contact was lost with Amelia’s Lockheed Electra as she closed in on completing her circumnavigational flight around the world. Aviation history was being made at an alarming rate in those days.
She would have been the first woman to fly around the world, and on a route following more or less the equator, flying much further over much more land than Wiley Post’s 8 day flight around the upper latitudes in ’33.
Understandably, when you try to make a bio-pic film, you have to leave a lot out about the person’s life. In the case of Amelia, reducing 40 years into 110 minutes requires a lot of picking and choosing of the ‘interesting’ parts of a person’s life. And what you may find interesting differs from what someone else would find interesting. Whereas I would have liked to have seen more of how Amelia was chosen to be on that first transatlantic flight that garnered her instant fame, thus allowing her to fly even more daring flights later, Mira Nair’s film focuses much of the middle chunk of the film on Amelia’s relationship with her husband (and publisher) George Putnam. [Enter a semi-love-triangle, and a the balancing of marriage and fame, and you have some melodrama to fill time with]. This is a choice that the writers and director make. It’s pretty conventional. It seems you can’t have a bio-pic on a person who doesn’t have some ‘dirty little secret’ to dwell on. I’m not trying to diminish that side of Amelia’s persona. An affair is an affair and I don’t approve. However, I went into the movie to see some flying, and would have enjoyed that as the focus. [the movie starts with Amelia’s first meeting with Putnam after she’s already networked as a pilot, when it could have dug into when Amelia first started to fly and got her first plane, and all that]
As for the final infamous flight, I'm glad that Mira Nair left some mystery to it. She didn't try to fictionalize any of the various scenarios that people have speculated about. No conspiracies are rehashed. All we have is the radio transmissions, the last words of Amelia, and then static.
There are a lot of voice overs in the film, of which I’m pretty sure are Amelia’s own exact words, from letters and her many published writings. Everything that needs to be said about Amelia the person, she said it herself. And maybe that is the real pitfall of creating “entertainment” out of her life. Compared to other bio-pics, she didn’t have a very tragic life (Edith Piaf), she didn’t live with OCD (Howard Hughes), she didn’t suffer with drugs (Johnny Cash, Ray), she wasn’t assassinated (JFK, Lincoln, Milk). She flew planes because she liked it, she made headlines because people liked her, and she was a role model for anyone wanting to become a pilot in the 30s. She was a woman in a man’s profession (about a decade before we knew Rosie the Riveter).
I looked through some reviews when I got home from the theater. A lot of the comments are similar to these:
"Amelia isn't a terrible movie, but its greatest value will be as a history lesson rather than as entertainment."
"'Amelia' plays less like a movie and more like a timeline."
"...an unsatisfying, frivolous, insubstantial look at someone whom some think of as an American idol."
"What could be more exciting than a biopic with Hilary Swank playing a world famous aviatrix? Perhaps a movie filled with more passion for dreaming than a screenplay that seems written from Earhart's history-making timelines."
Now maybe this is my mistake, but I think a good bio-pic should be historical. It should teach you something. And before I saw this film, a timeline of Amelia’s life was basically all I knew about her and I still found her fascinating and entertaining. The facts are interesting to me.
Amelia was an American Idol in her day, just like Lindbergh and Seabiscuit. It was the 30s, the depression, and people wanted to see that others were successful in their endeavors. Lots of the news was about escaping from reality. Movies were huge in the 30s. Stardom and celebrity were evolving concepts.
I think this speaks to our contemporary understanding of fame and what makes news. We would spend hours glued to the television and twitter reports about a boy trapped in a balloon, why? Because we hope he lives? Because there’s a chance he might not? We like the drama of what might happen next! If it hadn’t turned out to be a sham, and there had really been a boy in a balloon, we’re talking about the next ‘Baby Jessica’!! Is it news worthy though? Does it deserve a hours and hours of constant coverage? Then again, I don’t think Amelia will do well at the box office, which is unfortunate. And truth be told, lots of decent movies about interesting topics often get thrown to the curb for movies like “Saw VI” (seriously? 7?!). To each her own I suppose. I’ll never understand that at all though.
The film doesn't offer much commentary on Amelia’s life and choices. Not blatantly anyways. It could have dove a little deeper, but I’m not sure there is much more to find about Amelia. And that is probably what keeps this film from being popular with the majority of critics and audiences.
At one point in the film Amelia (Swank who looks the part minus the teeth), after spending some time in the spotlight for her transatlantic-passenger flight, says she wishes to fly again across the atlantic, this time solo, so that her fame isn’t “fake,” so that she actually earns it. From reading about the real Amelia, I think she really did fly because she wanted to. And taking risks was in her nature, and unfortunately the way our culture works, doing press tours, photo-ops, endorsements, creating clothing lines, writing books, giving lectures, and all the other things Amelia did in the spotlight, those things funded her flying. So she did them. So that she could fly. That point, I think the movie got across pretty well.
Is the film conventional? Does it fall into the cliche traps of a bio-pic? Is it in need of some trimming? In need of a more nuanced director? Yes.
Does it have anything to say about Amelia the flyer, her achievements? Should it have been made? Am I glad it was made? Should you see it? Yes.
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"After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying." - A.E.
"I lay no claim to advancing scientific data other than advancing flying knowledge. I can only say that I do it because I want to." - A.E.
"Adventure is worthwhile in itself." - A.E.
"The most effective way to do it, is to do it." - A.E.
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