/ 22 January 2010

In the flying machine

Mira Nair is a quirky and individualistic director who has made some excellent movies, Monsoon Wedding being the most notable.

Amelia is her biggest-budget movie so far, a true Hollywood epic (or at least it wants to be), with big stars — and it’s hard not to feel that Nair has been sucked into the whirlpool of big-budget Hollywood product and ended up trying to make a film that is not very sympathetic at all to her innate instincts.

Take the intimate scenes, for instance. In the past, Nair has been very good at getting strong feelings out of interpersonal relations, but in Amelia the core relationship is astoundingly shallow and lacking in any broader resonance.

Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) is the famous female aviator and early feminist of the 1930s; George Putnam (Richard Gere) is her manager, PR man, publisher, lover and ultimately her husband. Their relationship is tracked, along the length of the film, from their early and largely professional encounters, through their growing intimacy to marriage, infidelity and beyond.

Between passages of Earhart flying around the globe we check in with the two of them to see how things are going on the love front, but what we mostly get are quick sound-bite conversations, some rather basic facial expressions, Swank’s big shiny white chompers versus Gere’s chipmunky mouth, and then Amelia’s off on her next flight. Swank is personable, but Gere is mostly just twinkly — he doesn’t seem able to do more than play the man every woman (supposedly) would like to be in love with.

The structure of the film isn’t conducive to much depth or to a more close-up examination of Earhart’s love life — or, in fact, any part of her life other than the flying. Perhaps there wasn’t much else to her life than the flying, with one romantic complication thrown in. She had an affair with Gore Vidal’s father, Gene Vidal, an early promoter of aviation and ultimately the founder of airline TWA.

Scriptwriters Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan don’t, in fact, have much of a story here, or at least one with real narrative development and complication. Obviously they’ve got to deal with the flying, which was pioneering and is made to look reasonably good, and there are three or four major flights (including the last one) to deal with.

But what that leaves them with, once they’ve dealt with the childhood-dreams segment (essential for any kind of Hollywood character development), is a basically alternating structure, with episodes moving between Amelia’s flying and the rest of Amelia’s life. Amelia flies somewhere, Amelia returns to deal with Putnam and the rest of her life, Amelia flies somewhere else, Amelia returns again, Amelia flies … and so on. And all of it is swathed in repetitive, overbearing music.

Do they have a climax? I think not. Amelia disappeared on her 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe, and an attempt is made to give some excitement to her last moments in the air, but given the foregone conclusion it’s not very thrilling. To me, it just felt tedious as we cut back and forth between Amelia, the Navy people at her only possible refuelling station, and Putnam et al waiting anxiously back in the States. Maybe it’s just because one knows what’s going to happen, so there’s limited interest in the scenario’s being dragged out at any length, but I just wanted it to be over as soon as possible.

It’s a pity because there are interesting moments in Amelia. The issue of her commercial endorsements, which included her getting dragged up in something more ladylike, are a fascinating insight into her times, but little is done with them apart from a brightly staged montage sequence. Her insistence on a private deal with her husband-to-be, that neither would be limited by “any medieval code of faithfulness”, is piquant, but doesn’t really go anywhere except to look at one affair and decide it was a bad idea.

Her affair with Vidal is intriguing, though we are not given much sense of why she’d be so drawn to him. Certainly Ewan McGregor’s portrayal of Vidal doesn’t make him seem very fascinating, but perhaps that’s because the last time we saw McGregor he was playing a helicopter-flying priest and papal plotter in Angels and Demons, which is enough to destroy any actor’s credibility for a long time.

By the way, Earhart shows much affection for the young Gore Vidal, who, thanks to his father, became the youngest person to fly across the United States and hence something of a poster child at about age 10. But she and others keep referring to him as “Gore”, which as anyone who has read Vidal’s notes on himself will know was in fact his middle name: he was known to all as “Gene”, like his dad, until he became a writer and had to find a new name for himself.

Anyway, that is a minor lapse in what is otherwise an apparently authentic record of what Earhart’s life probably looked like. Which is the job Amelia does well — we get the look. Pity we don’t get much else.