AND THE WINNER IS…

About a year ago I was seated next to the Indian director Mira Nair at a luncheon in New York City and spent most of the afternoon picking her brain about her next project: a big-budget biopic of the legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart. I told Nair that as someone who is fascinated with American culture/history, the origins of public relations and celebrity, and the Oscar race, I couldn’t be more excited about it. Nair told me that a rough-cut of the film was being test-screened for the very first time later that day so she couldn’t be more nervous about it.

On Tuesday night, I was at New York’s Paris Theatre as Nair introduced the finished product to members of the public for the first time — along with stars Hilary Swank (Earhart), Richard Gere (her publicist/husband  George Putnam), and Ewan McGregor (her lover, allegedly, Gene Vidal) – at the world premiere of “Amelia” (Fox Searchlight, 10/23, trailer). Since then, reactions have been pouring in from every direction. Some have been friendly — Ray Bennett of The Hollywood Reporter calls it an “instant bio classic” that “ranks with recent real-life portrayals of Ray Charles by Jamie Foxx and Truman Capote by Philip Seymour Hoffman” and suggests it “could be similarly awards-bound.” Most, however, have been less generous — to cite a fairly representative example, Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times labels the film a “turkey” and “stinker” and says it clearly “missed the mark.” (For the record, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times — the unofficial dean of film criticism — registers somewhere inbetween.)

My own feelings are mixed. I’m generally a sucker for biopics like those that were so prevalent in theaters and at the Academy Awards during the heart of the studio-era — stuff like “Disraeli” (1929), “The Story of Louis Pasteur” (1936), “The Great Ziegfeld” (1936), “The Great Waltz” (1938), “Juarez” (1939), “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939), “The Pride of the Yankees” (1942), “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (1942), “Madame Curie” (1943), “Wilson” (1944), and “Lust for Life” (1956). They come around less often these days — probably because modern audiences are more cynical and less willing to accept the heroization of real-life figures — but a few always pop up during the awards season, including “Schindler’s List” (1993), “Pollock” (2000), “A Beautiful Mind” (2001), “Ali” (2001), “The Aviator” (2004), “Hotel Rwanda” (2005), “Good Night and Good Luck” (2005), “La Vie En Rose” (2007), and “Milk” (2008). This is because they’re generally regarded as “important,” and rare is the film rewarded by the Academy that isn’t.

The thing that sets apart those that resonate from those that don’t is fairly simple: they show us something about the person – real or invented – that we didn’t already know. The chief problem with “Amelia” is that it doesn’t. Earhart lived long enough ago that virtually nobody alive today can tell you first-hand what she was actually like, but not so long ago that people have stopped caring. The result is that most of us already know the core facts that the movie restates, and few others are introduced: she was the spunky woman who felt she could hold her own with the men, at least in the sky, and did; whereas Charles Lindbergh was “Lindy,” she was “Lady Lindy,” a feminist before feminism and a celebrity of the highest echelon; and, of course, that she never fulfilled her greatest ambition of flying entirely around the world, instead crashing along with her navigator somewhere in the Pacific while at the helm of her Electra aircraft.

The fact that everyone knows the ending of the film before the beginning might initially seem to be the hardest obstacle to overcome, but it isn’t — after all, the same could be said of “Titanic” and “United 93″ and they were damn good. No, the bigger problem is that Earhart’s life on the ground wasn’t nearly as exciting as her flights in the sky, which were themselves more exciting in concept than in practice. (Heck, Earhart herself could barely stay awake for those!) What really made Earhart a legend in her own time, and has sustained her as one after it, is less what she did than what she represented. Earhart was the living embodiment of the sense of limitless potential that Americans felt during the twenties — at least until a crash of a different sort sent them reeling back to reality. She was an outlier; a country girl who conquered the city; a pioneer on a new frontier; a go-getter with a can-do attitude for whom not even the sky was the limit; a person who would never say die, until she did. All of that is obviously impressive; it’s just not particularly conducive to a two-hour cinematic spectacle.

I think the filmmakers realized that but felt they could overcome it the same way Hollywood has always clogged the holes in its plots: with what the old studio chiefs used to call “boy-girl stuff.” (Preston Sturges mocked this in his 1941 classic “Sullivan’s Travels.”) They couldn’t. This, I believe, is because everything we knew about Earhart, both prior to seeing the film and during it up until her publicist plops a kiss on her — prompting both her and the audience to ask why he did that – suggests that nothing was ever more important to her than flying and that nothing else ever even came close. Frankly, everything we knew about her suggested she was entirely asexual. Now, all of a sudden, we’re to believe that she’s madly in love and sexually hungry? (I doubt that even “Pretty Woman”-era Richard Gere could have had that much of an effect on a woman, let alone Richard Gere twenty years later.) It just doesn’t ring true.

Neither does an attempt to introduce a love-triangle to the plot, which is another common act of desperation in Hollywood. Yes, it’s true that Earhart knew transportation tycoon Gene Vidal — that much is beyond dispute — but I don’t believe for one second that he was a romantic figure in her life, certainly not to the extent that the film implies he was. I submit that he is portrayed as one in the film for two reasons: (1) because the filmmakers needed a little more spice to make this thing fly, if you’ll pardon the pun, and (2) because Gore Vidal was apparently consulted by the filmmakers despite the fact that he has — as I found when I interviewed him exactly a year ago — aged into a bitter, egomaniacal S.O.B. who loves nothing more than name-dropping and placing himself and/or his family at the center of virtually every major event in our nation’s history. (He got himself into this film quite a bit, too.) He is a brilliant thinker and writer about American history, but he is not a credible source when it comes to his own history and someone should have recognized that. (According to Roger Friedman of The Hollywood Reporter, Putnam’s granddaughter is already making the media rounds insisting that the Vidal affair never happened.)

The biggest problem, though, is that the film never adequately answers the question: what about flying made Earhart feel it was worth the risk — dare I say likelihood — of death? In fact, it only even considers it flippantly when she first meets Putnam and he asks her why she flies, to which she responds, “Why does a man ride a horse?” That’s cute, but it’s just not good enough. (Subsequently, she mentions wanting to be “free,” like the animals in the wilderness and unlike the people in the civilization over which she flies, but that was already a cliche in her own time.) Not providing the audience with a decent answer to that question is like not providing the audience with the meaning of “Rosebud” after making them wonder about it for an entire film.

Having now exhausted my list of things to bitch about — yeah, I’ll let the iffy accents slide, I guess — it’s only fair to offer some praise. Swank is as good as anyone could possibly be as Earhart, and not only because she bears a striking resemblance to the character. As was the case with the two performances for which she won Oscars for best actress, ”Boys Don’t Cry” (1999) and “Million Dollar Baby” (2004), she imbues her character with both strength and vulnerability, a combo that few actresses can pull off convincingly. It seems unfair for her performance to be denied awards attention because of the shortcomings of the rest of her film, especially since other recent performances haven’t been, including Annette Bening in “Being Julia” (2004), Felicity Huffman in “Transamerica” (2005), and Cate Blanchett in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” (2007).

Also, “Amelia” deserves to be a part of any discussion about awards for best cinematography (Stuart Dryburgh, previously nominated for “The Piano,” has overseen some majestic shots from the air — although not as stunning as those in “Up in the Air”), best costume design (like last year’s “Changeling,” this film features exquisite fashion from the twenties), and best original score (thanks to a sweeping submission by the always-dependable Gabriel Yared, who incidentally won his Oscar for scoring another aviation-related epic, “The English Patient,” 13 years ago).

Photo: Hilary Swank in “Amelia.” Courtesy: Fox Searchlight.