Ah, the "biopic" -- the biographical film. Take a famous someone, choose the important bits from their life, make up dialogue that sounds stiff and artificial, then stage everything with all the finesse of a made-for-TV movie. Hollywood filmmakers seem to know that biopics aren't good for anything other than Best Actor awards, which are granted on the basis of how unattractive the performer was willing to make themselves for "authenticity." They certainly don't teach us much about the subjects, nor are they even entertaining. But they keep making them.
Those eyes! Those teeth! For the role of flyer Amelia Earhart, director Mira Nair (The Namesake) chose Hilary Swank, who admittedly bears a passing resemblance to Earhart. To play the role, Swank shaved several pounds off her already sinewy frame and replaced her already toothy smile with enormous, horse-like veneers. Swaggering about in 1930's gal trousers and speaking with an unconvincing, inconsistent Midwestern accent, Swank comes off less like Earhart than like a mediocre mimic of Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator -- she's all cheekbones, giant teeth, and spray-on freckles, without any character to back up the charade.
A gal can only act the script she's been given. In Swank's defense, she gets no support from director Nair, or from screenwriters Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan. The film begins and ends with Earhart's most famous flights, with only the occasional snippets of child-Amelia running through a Kansas field and voiceovers droning on about Amelia's desire to be free to hint at who she actually was. Ditto for her manager/husband George Putnam (Richard Gere) and her sometime lover Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), about whom Nair feels it's more important that we understand that his son will grow up to be writer Gore Vidal than we grasp why Amelia was so drawn to him.
Journal writing does not insight make. What we do get from Amelia are scraps of a fascinating life, dully told. When she's airborne, reaction shots of Swank looking out a window are all tediously the same, and so obviously recorded on a soundstage that it looks more as if she's doing sketches on Saturday Night Live than flying a plane. On the ground, Amelia gives flowery declarations like, "I want to be free, George! To be a vagabond of the air!" when not scribbling in her diary and thinking, "When I look back on the flight ...". Always, we yearn to learn a little about the woman's inner life, but in never comes.
Want to know about Amelia? Read a book. There's a moment when Amelia's husband points out that she notices beautiful women more than he does, followed soon by an instant-friends meeting between the aviatrix and Eleanor Roosevelt (Cherry Jones). So, briefly, it looks as if Amelia might veer into an interesting exploration of the possibly bisexual Earhart's relationships with the openly bisexual Vidal and rumored bisexual Putnam -- but no, that would involve some actual depth. Amelia is uninterested in depth, preferring instead to be a boring, unenlightening snapshot of a fascinating figure. Fortunately, there are books on the subject, should we want to actually learn something.