Amelia

In all honesty, I almost didn't see Amelia in the theater. It got such bad reviews and it didn't pull me in from the previews. But I was very curious because I wondered if it was as bad as most of the critics said it was. I have to report that it wasn't all that bad. It is a decent but conventional biopic.

We all know about Amelia Earhart (Hillary Swank). We know of her love of flying and her disappearance in 1937. Much of the film is about Amelia's romance and marriage to publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere). She only agrees to marry him if they have an unconventional marriage. She wants both of them to be free to see others. She has an affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor) who is the father of Gore. But that doesn't last. Of course, a lot of the film also focuses on her passion of flying. The last half hour is the best - it is about her last flight.

I think that Mira Nair does a good job of directing the film. I don't know why the critics are raking her over the coals. I have always admired her work. The flight scenes are wonderful. The acting is good. Swank even resembles Amelia. Gere is good and I liked McGregor. Christopher Eccleston is terrific as Fred Noonan - the navigator who was with Amelia went she went missing. And I enjoyed Cherry Jones's cameo as Eleanor Roosevelt. The main problem with the film is the script. And that is where Nair has to take a bit of the blame. Although she did the best with what she had she should have been able to tell that there were weaknesses in the script (written by Ron Bassl and Anna Hamilton Phelan). The story should have gotten into more of what made Amelia tick and cut back a bit on the schmaltzyness in certain scenes.

So all in all a decent (but unexceptional) film but one that could have been really good if it took a different direction.