Review of Amelia (2009) by Josh G — 19 Feb 2010

I wouldn't call Amelia bad, per se, so much as boring, lifeless. The A.V. Club is more damning, as seen in this pull-quote: "Considering its focus on a pioneering, rule-breaking icon, the filmâ??s utter lack of personality isnâ??t just a failure. Itâ??s close to an insult.".

I guess I can see that perspective. The movie does fail, mostly because it seems like a by-the-numbers biopic. It hits on a lot of well-known events from the life of Amelia Earhart, ending unsurprisingly with her disappearance over the Pacific. It's true that there is a focus here on her odd relationship with husband George Putnam (Gere), but they don't really share any true emotional bond. Putnam is unreasonably obsessed with Earhart, allowing her to walk all over him, but we are never allowed to understand this obsession. Maybe the filmmakers didn't know how to explain it either. And then comes Gene Vidal (McGregor), who similar to Putnam has a peculiar fascination with Earhart... but again, without any discernible cause. Perhaps it's just the fact that she was an independent woman in a time when women were expected to stay behind the scenes. Regardless, the movie just does not adequately present its characters' relationships.

So we see her fly a couple of times, but we're just waiting for the final flight. And so is the movie - skipping easily over other landmark moments in her career. A monumental flight across the Atlantic made her famous early in her life, but the trip is shown in wistful glances out of airplane windows and that's about it. Was there danger? Was it exciting? No idea. Adding to this, there's an attempt to frame the movie by cutting to scenes from her final flight around the world, with title cards reading what day in the flight it was. But these moments are useless - they don't provide any useful information, since the one thing we don't know (how many days she flew during that flight) is never divulged, and aside from images of Hilary Swank grinning at African children, there's nothing else of worth in these moments.

And so on. Amelia brings up the fact that the co-pilot for the final, fateful trip was an alcoholic. But this fact doesn't really affect the outcome of the movie in any way, since the filmmakers don't want to point any fingers. Earhart's over-confidence is never really directly addressed either (she was not as good a pilot as she and the media thought she was). So yes, we get the bare minimum here. An attempt is made at adding a dramatic undercurrent with her Putnam-Vidal love triangle, but everybody is so game. Nobody is concerned. Nothing is lost, nothing is gained. The movie trudges along, killing time until the final act.

And then nothing exciting happens. The end.