The best thing that I can say about Amelia, now playing from Fox Searchlight Pictures, is the filmmakers found the perfect actress to play Amelia Earhart. Hilary Swank is a talented performer and producer who has had a solid career, often playing quirky characters (Million Dollar Baby (2004), The Gift (2000) among many others). With high cheekbones, a lanky frame and a slight overbite, she doesn’t get and probably doesn’t seek ultra-glamorous movie roles. By the way, uncommon beauty never hurt Katharine Hepburn either. Swank has brought depth and believability to strong but vulnerable real-life women before – teacher Erin Gruwell is a recent example in Freedom Writers (2007).

The fact that Swank resembles Earhart physically is an advantage in that she can sell the aviatrix’s off-beat looks with no effort. She has to work a lot harder, however, to reveal all the shades of character this film requires on a whirlwind tour of Earhart’s relatively short life. Perhaps the first tipoff to the trouble in this biopic is the title in the opening frames crediting two books as the basis for the story: East to the Dawn by Susan Butler and The Sound of Wings by Mary S. Lovell. Writer/flight instructor Kim Green writes on GreatHistory.com about the thesis prepared by Lovell – that Earhart was torn between the limelight of her early fame and the drive to be a real aviation pioneer. Through the efforts of her promoter/book publisher (and later husband) George Putnam, Earhart’s early success was more pomp than accomplishment. She had to walk a fine line between keeping up the hype in order to focus attention on women in aviation while satisfying her own goals.

The exposition of this thesis is often overbearing in the film. It’s hard to completely fault India-born actress/producer Mira Nair, who directed Amelia, on this if one is to imagine the deal-making that got this ambitious production off the ground. Among the worst obligatory faux-pas was to cast Richard Gere as George Putnam. With his non-stop career as a romantic lead it would have been virtually impossible for him to keep the romance between Putnam and Earhart in the realm of believability. That difficulty is very obvious in the film. To further complicate matters, the introduction of Ewan McGregor as Gene Vidal pulls Butler’s thesis into the work about Earhart’s extra-marital affair with the New Deal’s head of commercial aviation. One can see in Swank’s facial expressions at times a lack of focus on how she should react. It’s no wonder she had trouble properly emoting in this part travelogue, part adventure film, part soap opera.

The best scenes in the film are the flying sequences. The planes look great, the flyovers well photographed and the visual effects mostly unobtrusive. Even if the scenics are overdone, they give Earhart and the audience a break from the issues back home. In her interaction with a cavalcade of characters, Swank as Earhart works most effectively with her fellow aviators and a lively Eleanor Roosevelt (Cherry Jones). The best of these supporting performances comes from Christopher Eccleston as Fred Noonan, making the round-the-world flight and the interaction between him and Earhart the most compelling in the film.

All of the characters and storylines in Amelia are based on true events and people in Amelia Earhart’s life (except the opening “girl chasing a plane” sequence — her interest in aviation came as a young adult). But the divergent paths and near collisions of the storyline resembles an air show gone awry more than a fluid biography. Lost in the process is the opportunity to showcase Earhart’s dedication to advancing women’s aviation and how her actions set a concrete foundation for the feats and opportunities of those who followed her in this ambitious endeavor.

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