Amelia

Review of the movie by Hans Sherrer
(December 26, 2009)

Amelia is a movie about the life of aviatrix Amelia Earhart. It stars two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank as Amelia, and Richard Gere as her husband and promoter George Putnam. The movie covers highlights of Amelia’s life.

Amelia Earhart became famous in 1928 when she was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. She was 30 years old. Although Amelia was an accomplished pilot and was the flight’s commander, she flew as a passenger with a male pilot and co-pilot. The flight was only successful because of her last minute decisions to cut weight from the plane by carrying less fuel and changing the flight plan. The plane landed in Wales instead of Paris as Charles Lindbergh had done a year earlier when he flew solo across the Atlantic.

Amelia continued to make many groundbreaking flights over the next nine years. She wasn’t independently wealthy and she didn’t have a benefactor, so she financed her flying by giving lectures and writing two bestselling books about aviation and her exploits. She also raised money by using her notoriety to sell commercial products – she even had her own clothing line.

In 1931 Amelia married George Putnam, the man who had arranged her 1928 flight across the Atlantic and managed her business affairs and promoted her career.

In 1932 Amelia did what many people believed impossible. She became the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic, and only the second person to do so. Fourteen men had died trying to duplicate Lindbergh’s 1927 feat. That she landed in Ireland and not Paris didn’t matter. She had world-wide fame as the depression raged, and at a time when people relied on movie newsreels to see the people who performed amazing feats of daring, courage and exploration.

Also in 1932 she became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the United States from one coast to the other.

Amelia later became the first person – man or woman – to fly from Hawaii to the mainland United States, when she flew solo from Honolulu to Oakland, California in 1935. That year she also became a visiting faculty member of Purdue University to counsel women on possible careers in aviation.

Amelia used her fame to encourage women to fly and she organized an all female airplane race across much of the U.S. She was also instrumental as an investor and advisor in the founding of the first passenger air shuttle between New York City and Washington, D.C. She actively promoted commercial aviation by speaking about flying as a safe and fast way for the general public to travel.

In 1937, Amelia embarked on her most ambitious flight that many aviation experts thought was foolhardy to attempt. She intended to not just be the first woman to fly around the world, but the first person to do it by a route near the equator. That meant she would have to fly across almost 7,000 miles of the Pacific by refueling only twice – at Honolulu and Howland Island. She didn’t plan to make the flight alone, but with Fred Noonan, who was considered one of aviations best celestial navigators. Remember, this was 1937. There was no satellite based GPS and there was no radar. Fliers navigated during the day by landmarks they could see and their compass, and at night by their compass and star sightings. A navigator’s skill was the key to arriving at a precise destination when flying over the ocean.

Purdue University put up $80,000 for Amelia to buy a twin-engine Lockheed Elektra and modify it with extra fuel tanks for the flight. The expenditure was justified by calling her plane a flying laboratory.

Amelia and Noonan left Oakland in March 1937 on their flight’s first leg to Honolulu. The next leg would be the most dangerous of the trip. It was to Howland Island, a tiny land mass – 1-1/3 miles long, 1/3 mile wide, with a high point ten feet above sea level – in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 1,900 miles from Honolulu. If Noonan miscalculated, they wouldn’t find Howland Island before they ran out of fuel, and they would have to ditch the plane in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

Loaded to the gills with fuel, one of the plane’s tires blew during takeoff and the plane crashed on the airport runway in Honolulu.

Refusing to a abandon her dream flight, Amelia raised more money and used her savings to repair the plane. Because of seasonal weather patterns she reversed the flight’s direction. On June 1, 1937 Amelia and Noonan took off from Miami to fly around the world in an easterly direction. Their flight was scheduled to cover almost 25,000 miles.

The world press eagerly reported on every leg of their trip as they first went to South America, crossed the Atlantic to Africa, and then to India, where they ran into the annual monsoon rains. That meant they were practically flying blind. But they kept on. In late June they arrived at Lae, New Guinea. The trip was taking a toll on Amelia and Noonan, and her husband George encouraged her to abort her around-the-world attempt. She rejected that idea and prepared for the next leg of their trip – crossing almost 2,600 miles of open ocean to Howland Island. With very little margin of error to use fuel searching for the tiny island – Amelia tried to increase the odds of success by doing what she had done for her first flight across the Atlantic nine years earlier – reduce the plane’s weight.

She stripped the plane of every thing she didn’t think was needed to make it fly. When they left Lae on July 2 they were dependent on Noonan’s ability to guide the plane to a tiny speck of land after flying for more than a dozen hours over the open ocean.

There was a U.S. Coast Guard cutter near Howland Island to help guide Amelia when her plane came within radio range. Although the cutter was able to hear Amelia’s radio transmissions, they were unable to determine her position. She was apparently only able to hear one of the cutter’s radio transmissions.

Amelia and Noonan didn’t make it to Howland Island. The last transmission the cutter received from Amelia was that in their effort to spot the island, “We are running North and South.” Her fame was such that the U.S. Navy launched the most extensive ocean search effort in history – and it remains so to this day.

Amelia absolutely succeeds as a period movie set during the 1920s and 30s. Amelia doesn’t just have the clothes, the cars, and the planes of that time – but it has the “feel” of that era. That authenticity is aided by the weaving of actual newsreel footage into the movie. Amelia also effectively uses the stylistic device of having her attempted around the world flight take up the entire movie – but it is interspersed with segments of key events in her life.

Amelia also succeeds at capturing the experience of what flying was like in the 1920s and 30s. It wasn’t the sanitary experience of today. The planes were noisy and you can almost smell the oil and feel the grit. A duplicate of Amelia’s Elektra is used in the film, which was shot on locations around the world and has very few special effects. Swank became an airplane pilot in preparation for her role, so the movie’s authenticity is further enhanced by flight scenes showing her flying the plane.

Compressing any accomplished person’s life story into a two-hour movie can be challenging. However, that may not have been particularly difficult to do with Amelia Earhart, because she was not a complicated person. She didn’t have any children and she was married to her business manager. She lived to fly, and she was determined to succeed once she made up her mind. That is no better illustrated than by her last flight. She pushed on and took a calculated risk to try and make it to Howland Island. Her options were to quit or keep going. She didn’t make it, but it wasn’t for lack of gumption.

It was her willingness to try – her refusal to impose artificial limits on herself or to define herself by what society thought a woman should do – that made her an inspiration to woman of her time.

Amelia didn’t depend on a government to mandate her equality with males, and she didn’t wait for society to evolve to where a woman doing a “manly” activity like flying was considered acceptable in polite society. She danced to her own tune and just did it. Without a doubt she might have been the first person – man or woman – to walk on the moon if she had lived a generation later, and she might have done it by raising the money to build and launch the spacecraft. It is easy to imagine her saying: “Who needs NASA?” Who would have stopped her from trying? No one.

Amelia was born in Kansas, and she was raised in a middle-class family. She had a dream to fly, and she did. She pushed herself until she ultimately found her limit. But it wasn’t imposed by any institution or other people or self-doubt. What stopped Amelia was physics and the law of gravity when her plane ran out of fuel and crashed in the Pacific. But she died daring to do what no person had done before. That is her legacy.

In an age when the media is dominated by bloviating pompous politicians and sports and entertainment celebrities, it is refreshing to see a big budget movie made that honors the life of a person like Amelia Earhart – a modest person who became one of the most well-known women in the world for what she accomplished in her life.

Hilary Swank was born for the role of Amelia, and she bears an eerie physical resemblance to her. She is the film’s executive producer, and it is unquestionably and a labor of love. Swank spoke of Amelia in an interview about the film, “She made no apologizes for living her life the way she wanted to do. She lived her life on her own terms.” We can only thank her for daring to create a movie that captures Amelia Earhart’s spirit. Amelia died at 39, but she is as inspiring today for any woman, young person, or man for that matter, as when she was alive. She tried damn it! As she said once, “Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done.”

The Spirit of St Louis (1957) starring Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh is the gold standard for judging a flyer’s biopic. Amelia is the equal of The Spirit of St Louis – which is only fitting because the media dubbed Amelia Earhart as “the Lady Lindy.”

Amelia

Director, Mira Nair
Executive producer, Hilary Swank
Producers, Lydia Dean Pilcher, Kevin Hyman and Ted Waitt
Screenplay, Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan
Released to theaters in October 2009, Rated PG, 111 minutes
Featuring:
Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhart
Richard Geere as George Putnam
Ewan McGregor as Gene Vidal
Christopher Eccleston as Fred Noonan