Blitzkrieg Takes A Test Flight With Hilary Swank In AMELIA!

Beaks here...

A few years ago, I attended a long-lead screening for a modestly budgeted biopic that had big time festival/awards aspirations. For some reason, the film was completely off my radar, so I had no significant prejudices walking in (i.e. ideal movie-viewing conditions). A couple of hours later, I was thoroughly unimpressed. "Standard-issue biopic." "Egregiously showy lead performance." "Did they have to stick so closely to the narrative of IN COLD BLOOD?" Clearly, this movie was a festival season non-starter. Months later, when Bennett Miller's CAPOTE wowed critics at Toronto, Venice, Telluride etc., I realized I was going to be in the extreme minority on this one. The same thing could happen to Blitzkrieg on Mira Nair's Amelia Earhart biopic, AMELIA. Or this could be another prestige-picture miss from the celebrated director of SALAAM BOMBAY!, MISSISSIPPI MASALA and MONSOON WEDDING. On the plus side, Nair's assembled a terrific cast (Hilary Swank, Ewan McGregor, Richard Gere, Virginia Madsen and Christopher Eccleston). On the "Is this 1995?" side, she's working from a screenplay by Ron Bass. Just keep this in mind as Blitzkrieg works poor AMELIA over...

Howdy folks. I’m not usually in the habit of doing this, but since it’s not scheduled to open ‘til October, I thought I’d write in with a quick review of a movie that screened in SoCal last night: Mira Nair’s flygirl biopic AMELIA, starring Hilary Swank. By far the most puzzling movie I’ve seen in a long time, AMELIA is not so much bad in any particular regard as it is relentlessly tepid. We’re talking bland like tapioca, baby, for the vast majority of it’s two hours-ish running time, which I guess you could maybe guess from the title, as I would have assumed they’d call an Amelia Earhart movie WINGS OF AMBITION or CLOUDS OF HOPE or SKY OF VIRTUE or something like that. RAY worked as a biopic title, but RAY is a cooler first name than AMELIA. No sci-fi hero ever fired an Amelia-gun, you know? Least not to my knowledge. The movie covers mostly the latter years of Earhart’s life, her famous flights and such, but flashbacks a few times to her childhood and an eerily well-cast little mini Swank look-alike. Everyone in the movie is perfectly serviceable, from the always dynamic/frightening Million Dollar Baby through some old man who looks and acts like Richard Gere to the effortlessly charming but completely wasted Ewan McGregor. Rounding out the cast is Burton’s future ALICE, Mia Wasikowska, here playing a fiery youngster who wants to follow in Earhart’s footsteps but instead falls victim to not having her subplot go anywhere, and Joe Anderson, doing that quiet sexy/brooding/scruffy thing he does so well, as any number of teenage ACROSS THE UNIVERSE devotees will gladly tell you. Christopher Eccleston shows up way late in the game as a drunken navigator, and Virginia Madsen has about a minute of screen time as a talented adult actress who clearly hasn’t been offered any substantial roles in a while. I liked Miss Nair’s THE NAMESAKE very much, so it took me thinking about this one for a bit before I realized what had struck me so odd about it: not that the whole thing was uniformly lukewarm, not that big plot threads were constantly being introduced before just sort of aimlessly petering off, but that there was virtually no on-screen conflict for the entire running time. The movie basically consists of Earhart waiting around until she feels like trying her hand at another flight then she lets the people around her know that’s what she wants to do then they say “okay,” then she goes and she does it. Her and Gere end up together around the halfway mark, so don’t expect any WALK THE LINE “will they or won’t they?” antics. Her and Ewan make out in an elevator but then both parties appear to forget the whole thing ever happened, so don’t expect any big confrontational brawling. The public accuses Earhart of being a daredevil-for-profit at one point, but this is resolved/forgotten about before it’s exploited in any interesting way. I think the closest anyone ever comes to cracking this kind of glaring Screenwriting 101 issue is that Swank keeps talking about how she can’t be tied down and stuff, even though her and Gere appear to have a perfectly happy and functional marriage. There’s a few scenes at the start (two, if I remember correctly) where they’re not sure if the plane is gonna take off and they bump the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN theme on the temp soundtrack: those were sort of exciting, I guess. The movie on the whole, however, ends up as sort of a hodgepodge of all the least interesting scenes of THE AVIATOR, taking great care to omit any big emotions or struggles or flight scenes, although at one point early on Swank saves a guy from almost falling out of an airplane, but then like, slips and almost falls out herself. That was pretty weird. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with history knows how this thing ends: a sort of sad question mark with only one possible answer. But the movie starts with what looks like Old Amelia (we don’t have any visual context for her yet) talking about how she wants to be a vagabond of the sky, and you think, “Huh? Are they gonna have her live in this version? That’d be kinda ballsy…” but then she repeats the same dialogue in front of us around the three quarter mark, which seemed like sort of a cheat. So it ends with her and Gone in Sixty Seconds Villain flying around for a while not knowing where land is, then there’s a shot of water, then Richard Gere stares out at the ocean, then there’s one of those pre-closing-credits informational crawls: “Amelia Earhart was a class act all the way, etc.” It always bugs me when death is so romanticized in movies. I don’t know about you, but I bet crashing into the ocean would be fucking terrifying. You also get a bit of closing voice-over with Earhart talking about pursuing your dreams and how anything is possible and never let anyone tell you what you can’t do and you gotta believe in yourself and all that, which rang a little odd as a way to cap a movie about a gal who died trying to do something everyone was telling her she couldn’t do. Then they do that thing where they show you footage of what the real person looked like in real life: “Remember that historical figure you just spent two hours watching? Well it was an imposter! Ha ha ha!” Frustrating, I guess, considering what such a thing could have been. I walked out of the theater and had to speed home and go on FunnyOrDie and watch DANIEL DAY-LEWIS DOES PORN just to wash that beige feeling out of my system. I wouldn’t recommend paying to see AMELIA, unless you’ve never seen a biopic or any other movies with flying in them. Apparently SAW VI is opening that day too, so maybe just see that and then sneak into this one after, if you want. I would make some sort of torture joke here, but, like I said, this movie wasn’t bad, just sort of baffling. The end. If you use this, call me Blitzkrieg.