Review: Amelia (with trailer)

By Nigel Powlson

IN the days before spending two weeks on a reality TV show could make you famous, Amelia Earhart was a genuine celebrity – an icon before the word became over and wrongly used.

In the 1930s, when education and opportunity were still largely denied to women, she became a pioneer in the male-dominated field of aviation.

The "aviatrix" adventurer had already crossed the Atlantic with a male crew before her ground-breaking solo flight across the same ocean fired the American public's imagination.

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She used this fame to promote women's rights issues, became a best-selling author, and cemented her legendary status by disappearing in 1937 attempting to fly around the globe.

In this episodic biopic, Hilary Swank is perfectly cast, looking uncannily like photographs of the real Amelia.

She captures the tomboyish eagerness, the selfish, stubborn streak and undoubted courage of the real Earhart and is a million miles away from the sassy version played for laughs by Amy Adams in Night of the Museum 2.

The film is told in flashback from the fateful final journey, skipping lightly from scenes of Earhart's Kansas childhood, through her famous flights and back to the circumnavigation of the world.

Earhart married her publisher and later publicist, George Putnan (a typical Richard Gere) but had an affair with another air pioneer Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor).

Both main male roles are undernourished. McGregor passes in and out inelegantly and Gere is merely a foil for Swank's Oscar-chasing (she already has a couple to her name). But the period trappings are lavish and the movie has an undeniable warmth.

It is directed by Mira Nair, whose composition skills are well known from works such as Monsoon Wedding. Here she delivers a rather standard-looking period drama – newsreel footage, newspaper headlines, and voiceovers.

But the film takes off every time Earhart soars into the skies. The aerial footage is a joy on the big screen, and add Gabriel Yared's John Barry-aping score and it's like Out of Africa all over again.

AMELIA

CERTIFICATE: PG

RUNNING TIME: 111 mins

STARTS: Today at the Odeon and Cinema De Lux in Derby; from November 27 at Cinebowl in Uttoxeter.

RATING: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■