Amelia Dvd Review – Crashes And Burns Before It Ever Leaves The Tarmac
How could the myth of one of the most amazing women in American history be mutated into a shallow, superficial emotional void? If you, like me, have the peril to see Amelia, you’ll probably wrestling with that question, too. If you’re a fan of screenplays with narrative spin and consistency, you’re out in the cold this time. Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan wrote something that, if anthropomorphized, could succor as a poster child for ADD. Key events in Amelia’s life get a few minutes survey and then we’re off to the next big moment, jumping along a series of events as if Mira Nair had a checklist in front of her and was furiously trying to check everything off before she’d shot two hours worth of footage. Looking for insights into how these events shaped The First Lady of the Skies? Good luck with that. Nothing builds on what comes before it; a tumultuous conflict in one scene will have been apparently forgotten five minutes later, making the cast’s behavior really odd and inexplicable.
Unique and inexplicable are good buzzwords for Amelia. Select the performances. Lift them very far away and bury them under a cairn of very heavy rocks. There’s an odd, mannered affectation to the acting in Amelia, reminiscent of the B-movies of the ’40s and ’50s with their stilted line readings from an amateur night cast. Was director Mira Nair consciously trying to evoke the sensibility of filmmaking from a more innocent age? I don’t care. No excuses could save her from my wrath at this point. The end result is that you’ve got a ferociously talented cast including Hilary Swank, Richard Gere, and Ewan McGregor looking like they’re struggling through a dinner theater production based on Mrs. McWhorter’s 3rd Grade Salute to the Four Food Groups. Mira Nair’s direction seems perversely calculated to expose her actors in the worst possible light, and she succeeds with flying colors.
Of all the travesties in thespianism, Swank’s is the worst and the most inexplicable. She’s got Amelia’s blissful enthusiasm down pat, but she never gives us more than a cheerfully enthusiastic cardboard cut-out. Amelia Earhart fought fearsome battles to crop out a niche in aviation, a field that was the sole province of men, but also one that was in its infancy, presenting formidable challenges and perils for anyone who sought to buy to the skies. What makes a person like Amelia tick? What gave her the mental toughness and drive to not only participate in our early conquest of the air, but become an aviation myth? You won’t find out from Swank’s performance – it’s purely superficial. Swank’s voiceover monologues don’t count, either. Coming up with two dozen banal ways to say, “I feel so free,” doesn’t amount to characterization.
The relationships depicted in the film don’t make any sense either. Amelia’s relationship with George Putnam (Gere) is a lynchpin of the narrative, but what a bright, idealistic, go-getter like Amelia would see in an unscrupulous, chauvinistic snake like Putnam is a mystery that would make Mssr. Poirot throw up his hands in exasperation. First, she’s under his thumb, then he’s fully supportive of her aerial adventures, and these sea changes in attitude seem to take place in a nanosecond. Nair’s strategy for characterization seems to be give the character a new personality if it’s the easiest way to advance the spot. Consistency isn’t required; in fact, it’s a dreadful nuisance that must not be brooked. Even the inclusion of Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor) as the third point of a love triangle doesn’t add any tension. Amelia’s characters don’t have any deep currents of emotion that sustain themselves longer than any single scene, so there’s no pay-off in making an emotional investment in them. We know Vidal will be hip-checked out of the picture when the script-o-tronic deems it convenient to advance the narrative, anyway.
Amelia’s one of the worst biopics in recent memory, which is a damned shame, because Amelia Earhart is one of the most fascinating women in American history. Her life and achievements are a dramatic gold mine – how could you go wrong with a account like this. Let me count the ways. Amelia is a soulless machine, dutifully slogging through pivotal moments in its heroine’s life and sucking all the drama, wonder, and awe from her story with a remorseless efficiency. The First Lady of the Skies deserved far better than this.
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Filed under Nair For Men by on Jan 17th, 2012. 