The structure of the film is completely trite: We see Amelia setting off on her final trip, and then cut back to her childhood in Kansas learning to fly with her father; then we see her later in the round-the-world trip flying over Africa, and we cut back to her first flight across the Atlantic. This back-and-forth format is so tired that it's surprising director Mira Nair is even breathing. You could design a computer program, I'm sure, to come up with a more creative plot.
Amelia Earhart (played by Hillary Swank) meets George Putnam (Richard Gere), a New York publisher and advertising and PR man who is looking for a woman who can sit in the back of a plane while two men fly it to London (or Ireland, as it turns out to be). Earhart is strong-willed, but concedes control for hope of marketing riches that would follow the flight. And the riches do follow. When she is done, she gets swept up on a lecture tour with product endorsements and instant fame.
She falls in love with Putnam and also meets and falls for Gene Vidal (Ewan McGreggor), Gore Vidal's father. As she struggles with her love life, she embarks on other flying expeditions (from Hawaii to California; across the Atlantic solo; and somewhere in South America). At some point she attempts the Mt. Everest of flying - a trip around the world. As history shows, her plane goes down somewhere in the South Pacific.
There are so many problems with this film it's hard to know where to begin. My biggest complaint is how lifeless and superficial the movie is. We basically don't know anything about the characters (including Earhart) or their motives and backgrounds. Putnam and Earhart fall in love sorta because they sit next to each other in meetings and Model-T Fords - but we never see why they fall in love. Clearly Ewan McGreggor is hot, but it is never clear why Vidal and Earhart are attracted to one another. (Also - putting a child Gore Vidal in the film is totally unnecessary and dumb. His character adds nothing to the film - and honestly, I think most viewers don't know enough about him today to care who he was then.)
We are never shown that Earhart is a great pilot - and one of our first introductions to her is as a passenger in her trans-Atlantic flight shows her as a restless but compliant second to the male fliers. This doesn't help her case as a master aviatrix. (OK - I do want to say that I love the word 'aviatrix' - and not because it sounds like dominatrix - but because there aren't enough English words that end in 'trix'.) We see that she was selected because she was pretty and could fly - but we are supposed to think that she was the best pilot in the world (or something like that), but we never see this.
Not only is the structure of the script terrible, but the dialogue is laughable too. It seems like most of the talk in the film is simply explaining what was going on or what going to happen next in very clear terms. It felt like the dialogue was written by children - or maybe for a children's book. At one point, Earhard says that she likes flying because it lets her move in three dimensions ... Well, yes, Amelia, you can also walk or run or sit in bed in three dimensions if you want too! This terrible talking was compounded by Swank's totally terrible affected accent. I can only guess that Earhart had some midwestern folksy accent - though it really just comes out as a caricature of a 1930s woman.
(In addition, the production values are terrible and I was constantly bothered by the badly looped-in dialogue that didn't sync with the footage on screen, especially in the most important moment of the film as Earhart is leaving for her final journey -which is shown twice!)
One of my biggest pet peeves in film is anachronisms that would be easy to fix - like bad props and costumes. This film features two Longines watches that are shamefully modern and totally unnecessary. These are clearly put in by the studio's marketing department - but there's no reason why Nair should have allowed modern watches (that do sorta look old) rather than vintage Longines watches - especially when the Longines brand was basically made on the back of 1930s-era aviation. I mean, Nair should be in control of everything on screen - props and costumes and all. If you can see a quartz watch on a wrist in 1937, why not a black box in the cockpit of Earhart's plane. That would have made the search for the wreckage much easier!
In the end, Earhart does not come off as a feminist who is in control of her sexuality or her career during an era when women were not equal to men. She comes off as a woman who knows how she is a second-class citizen and uses her sexuality to control men and steer her career. I think it is, in fact, anti-feminist to suggest that a woman's only tool is her sexuality. This plays directly into the themes of the chauvinist world we live in and is not progressive at all.
Stars: .5 of 4
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