Movie review Oct. 29, 2009 - Amelia

The weekend features noncommercial specials and the usual Blank Page offering. Saturday Halloween night at The Orpheum, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which I once speculated was the best horror movie of them all at 7; and four lesser but not stock horrors will be Friday and Saturday at Murdock, 536 N. Broadway: The House on Haunted Hill from 1959 and the Last Man on Earth, a version of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, both starring Vincent Brice, Carnival Souls, a longtime cult classic of the film festival cheapie variety, and the seminal original Night of the Living Dead: House on Haunted Hill at 7:30, Last Man on Earth at 9, Carnival of Souls at 10:30, and Night of the Living Dead at midnight, at the Murdock 536 N. Broadway Friday and Saturday. On Sunday, the Blank Page at 91 W. Douglas offer Phenomena perhaps better known as Creepers, a story about a madman in a girls school directed by the notorious but sometimes admired Dario Argento and starring Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasence at 7:30.

And commercially, we have Hillary Swank as Amelia Earhart in Amelia. Amelia purports to tell the story of aviation and feminist pioneer Amelia Earhart, and does apparently include most of the important events in her life; but it unfortunately doesn’t tell much more about her than a plot outline would. Earhart grew up in Kansas with a charming but alcoholic father who, she says, “failed her in every way” and a mother who wanted to fly with her; but if any of this had anything to do with her character or motivations, we are left to discover the connections by ourselves. When her longtime lover, husband, and sponsor Richard Gere asks Swank why she wants to fly, which is extremely dangerous the way she wants to do it, all that she says is that she wants to do it because she wants to, and the question is never brought up again. Swank’s relation to Gere is apparently supposed to be love, and he is clearly in love with her, but to me it looks very much as if she is consciously or unconsciously using him as a cash cow; watch the timing of her affair with Ewan McGregor, for instance. The marriage with Gere is supposedly an open one, but that doesn’t quite seem to fit Gere and Swank doesn’t seem to care much about that. She boasts of her honesty but does not much react to Gere’s claiming that his financial support, without which she doesn’t seem to be able to function, is based on fraud; her principles do not seem to run very deep. I keep using terms like “apparently” and “seems to” because Amelia never deals with any of these motifs enough to indicate any concern with their deeper significance. This reduces Swank to more a figurehead than a character, and it’s hard to care about a mere figurehead who doesn’t seem to have any inner life to speak of, which lack in turn makes her seem hard and self-centered, if not selfish. This might matter less if the movie made flying irresistible; but like Whip It with rollerskating, Amelia deals with flying in such a flat way, mostly through ariel photography of great beauty, but there’s nothing more, that I never shared Swank’s passion for it and her accomplishments looked like mere ego satisfaction. There was a lot of story available, but screenwriters Susan Buller and Mary S. Lovel haven’t told much of it, and director Mira Nair has added very little to the skeletal script.

Amelia Earhart deserves a much better movie that Amelia; let’s hope she gets one someday. Unfortunately, I don’t think there will be another star who could fit the role as well as Hillary Swank. I wish she had been given a better chance at it.