“Who wants a life imprisoned in safety?” So asked Amelia Earhart in an era when
women who charted their own lives were usually labeled eccentric or aggressive.
They were seen to walk beyond the bounds that had been laid down for them by the
collective. Earhart not only jumped the barriers, but for following her
genuinely impossible dream, she became the stylish, reserved heroine of women of
the 1930s. The film misses her real contribution to women.
Mira Nair’s
movie “Amelia” has opened to lukewarm reviews. It’s getting a bum rap. It is,
without question, a glossy Hollywood movie but it also being judged too much by
contemporary standards, perhaps by young movie critics and filmmakers who don’t
understand the first thing about the state of women, communication, or
aeroplanes in 1937.
Consider
this: In June of that year, when Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan
took off on their journey around the world, communication by telephone and radio
was in its infancy. Beyond Morse code and temperamental voice radio,
navigational aids in the air were nearly non-existent. To get to the point where
she could wheedle a Lockheed Electra from her patron and husband, publisher G.P.
Putnam, Earhart simply kept flying – anything would do.
A high
profile woman in a low tech world had the benefit of being wrapped in a certain
glamorous mystery. Earhart caught the public fancy and held it even in death.
This is what the movie misses. A world that waited for her landing on Howland
Island has wondered ever since what happened. People who were alive during
Earhart’s ascendancy will tell you the movie is bloodless, that it fails to
capture the real battles she fought just to get in the air. It fails also to
present the dissension between Earhart and her husband, the publisher turned P.R.
agent for his wife’s dangerous escapade. Richard Gere’s gentle George Putnam is
at odds with the tough man we know from the biographies.
Hilary Swank
does a fine job of resembling her character and saying all the right things, but
Earhart, though shy in the face of publicity, was a fighter. Switching back and
forth between her flying clothes and the glorious evening dresses of the ‘30s,
Swank does capture every bit of the physical glamour that Earhart embodied.
In spite of
it’s glitz, the movie does offer the bare bones of Earhart’s story, and for
anyone who has been held by the mystery for years, it is a welcome, if not
enlightening, addition to the lore. It’s worth seeing and may even lure you to
one of the good biographies out there.
The hugely
advanced technology of today’s world suggests that the solution to the
disappearance of the aviator and her navigator may yet be found. The curiosity
about Earhart that has lingered for years is an emotional sort, the sort that
still wants to know what destroyed the dream of a brave pioneer.
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