Amelia Flies Low

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Along with Harriet Tubman, Sacagawea, Eleanor Roosevelt, and perhaps Hillary Clinton, Amelia Earhart is at the top of every elementary school’s list of women whose life stories are meant to inspire girls. Among these, Earhart is a bit of a mixed role model. She was an aviation pioneer—aviatrix is such a glamorous, satisfying word—but also a self-promoter and possibly insufficiently competent to have attempted global circumnavigation. Oh, and, apparently, an adulteress. Unfortunately, it is that last aspect that Mira Nair’s Amelia chooses to linger over. Rather than providing a glimpse into her adventurous girlhood—or an in-depth look at why she so loved flying and what hurdles she encountered—the movie focuses on her marriage to public relations man George Putnam and her dalliance with former West Point athlete Eugene Vidal, an affair that is meant to relate somehow to her thirst for freedom. Take your child to this movie only if you are prepared to spend the ride home in a good, long discussion about marital infidelity .

That’s not the only reason to skip taking your kids to this film. Apart from stirring aerial views of deserts and waterfalls, it’s boring. Hilary Swank plays Earhart as a slow-talking, really almost dim-witted woman. I came out of the movie struck by how Swank has played not one but two women—Earhart and the boxer Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby—whose distinction derives from their being “female talent” competing in a male arena, pushed and managed, in each case, by men who love them. Or purport to. And how it doesn’t work out well for either.