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Dir. Mira Nair
Rating: 3.6 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
The lure of the big Hollywood bio pic has set down many a talented director, from Michael Mann (Ali) to Spike Lee (Malcolm X) to Milos Foreman (Man on the Moon) and even to Martin Scorsese (The Aviator). The trouble comes when directors feel the need to compromise their singular visions in order to convey the gravity of their subjects. These films then fall prey to the worst Hollywood instinct, swimming in a murky morass of clichés and broad stroke assumptions. Alas, Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding) is no match for this particular abyss. She has made the worst kind of cinematic homage to Amelia Earhart, turgid, flat and as lifeless as a lug wrench. Hilary Swank lends her considerable artistic heft -- and teeth -- to portraying Earhart, an adventurous female pilot and feminist icon from the '30s, but nothing about her performance, from the stylized cadence of her accent to her jaunty short hair bobs feels lived in. Richard Gere, here playing Earhart's publisher and husband George Putnam, fares no better, his character's peaks and valleys as uncharted and foggy as one of his wife's ill-fated transcontinental journeys. Indeed, even her wardrobe -- all jodhpurs, colorful scarves and leather bombardier jumpsuits -- looks as though it just got pulled off the wardrobe truck. Perhaps the most egregious element in the film, though, is the stilted script by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan. "Look how free they are," muses Earhart, flying over a rush of animals on an African plain, a point the film feels it has to make again and again. The disjointed scenes never really add up to much of anything as far as interpersonal dynamics go, and there's almost no sense of Amelia herself, transformed by her immense celebrity and the resolutely capitalist strivings of her husband. As an icon of feminine strength and resolve, the screenwriters give precious little for their Earhart to connect with, and even less to do, other than force everyone in her life to grant her the freedom she's forever rhapsodizing. The curious effect is to actually diminish what Earhart managed to accomplish in her life. By the time she and George reconnect after a separation amidst the crashing surf and rolled up khakis of a Viagra ad, you realize the film has almost nothing in its core.
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