Amelia

Amelia

I am interested in all news stories that illuminate attempts to solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance on July 2, 1937, which have been going on since. It is very likely she crashed at sea, but you never know. Those Pacific atoll clues are tantalizing. It’s not her absence that captivates me; it’s her life.

She was strong and brave and true, and she looked great in a flight suit. None of that ladylike decorum for her: before marrying publisher George Putnam, she wrote him that their marriage would have “dual controls” and neither should be bound “by a medieval code of faithfulness.” Maybe she kept an out for Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), who founded TWA and fathered Gore: he told his son he loved her but didn’t marry her “because I didn’t want to marry a boy.”

Hilary Swank embodies my idea of what Earhart must have been like in Mira Nair’s “Amelia.” She looks like her; smiles like her; evokes her. Swank is an actress who doesn’t fit into many roles, but when she does she really does. The tousled hair; the freckles; the svelte figure; the fitness; the physical carriage that says, “I know exactly who I am and I like it and if you don’t, bail out.” Not only did she fly solo across the Atlantic after Lindbergh, she even looked like him.

It tells this story well enough through solid performances and period detail. It gets so down with her final flight that many of the radio transmissions between Amelia (Swank) and Coast Guard cutter Itasca (stationed off Howland Island) are repeated verbatim. (They could hear her but not vice versa.) And it ends on just about exactly the right note:

She was a role model for early feminists; an American hero untainted by Lindbergh’s Nazi sympathies. A few years after she died, American women would be asked to hang up their aprons, put on overalls and work on the production lines of this country’s wars. She was the real deal. Yes, she signed contracts to endorse chewing gum, soap and a fashion line but she needed the money to fund her flights; and she always chewed the gum; used the soap; wore those clothes.

I guess I sort of knew that she married famed New York publisher G.P. Putnam (Richard Gere). It never registered. The film reports, correctly I assume, that Putnam was instrumental in promoting her, booking her lectures, publishing We and raising funds for flights; it doesn’t much get into how a rural Kansas tomboy got along with such a famous Manhattan socialite who published Lindbergh’s We. George loved her at first sight and forever after did Amelia love him right back again.

That is the problem with Amelia Earhart’s life as a potential movie it has been done. She was strong, she was brave, she was true; she did more for female aviators than any one person before or since; and she looked fabulous in a flight suit. She flew across the Atlantic by herself; she vanished somewhere over the Pacific; she died too young, and nothing untoward can be said of her. She didn’t even smoke, though Lucky would have killed for an endorsement like that I suppose.

I’m not saying Mira Nair and her screenwriters, Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan should have made things up for “Amelia.” They were right not to do so. But there’s only so much tension inherent in a happy life. At least they avoided the pitfall Billy Wilder stumbled into when he put Jimmy Stewart on board “The Spirit of St. Louis” (1957). Lindbergh had a Nazi decoration from the ’30s and his baby got kidnapped, but Wilder was stuck with a long flight during which nothing happens except that a fly gets into the cockpit.

“Amelia” is a perfectly good biopic about a great woman, competently directed and well-acted all around. It convinced me of what I’d never ceased suspecting: that Earhart’s significance lay not only in her bravery as an aviatrix, but also in her courage as an early 20th century lady to live life on her own terms or at least outside those prescribed for well-behaved women of her day. The following generation of American females grew up beneath her vapor trail.

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