Amelia

Starring Hilary Swank, Richard Gere; Directed by Mira Nair; 111 minutes

There are two pioneering women crossing the Atlantic Ocean in this film. One is the title character, Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank), a Kansas native, the first woman to fly across the pond. The other is Mira Nair, the film’s director (Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding), the first Indian woman to make a movie about Americans.

Earhart made her historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, about a year after Charles Lindbergh’s epochal jaunt. America fell head over heels in love with her, just the way it had with gallant, modest Lindbergh, and she became an instant inspiration to millions, a mythic swan soaring above the horizon lines of cash and class, the festering scabs of World War One.

The funny thing is that she did it as a passenger in a plane with two others, not as a solo pilot like Lindbergh, but never mind. America was hungry for a “Lady Lindy” and Amelia filled the bill. The film takes care to show us that flying was Earhart’s one true and only real love and setting aviation records her deepest passion.

There have been umpteen biopics about Earhart, a charmed, reckless, ultimately self-destructive person who died young (like James Dean and Michael Jackson) and who still has star power after she’s shuffled off the mortal coil. Amelia is the BBC version of this classic America tale: the exuberance of fearless, questing youth translated into the tragic, cold fire of Laurence of Arabia, more shadow than light. That said, Nair has made a lovely, overstuffed sofa of a film in the Merchant Ivory style, every frame brimming with opulence and comfort. Even minor characters are beautifully dressed, their clothing like supple architecture. Voiceovers of the actual words Earhart wrote and spoke about her flying experience add human feeling, even magic, to what is typically AOK. A nice touch.

Hilary Swank plays Earhart with a homespun elegance. She’s willful without ever being strident, sounding British even without an accent. An undeclared feminist just after women had won the right to vote, Earhart famously gave her husband a written note at their wedding ceremony freeing him, and herself, from living by medieval codes of faithfulness. She was a force of nature as certain and silent as the capillaries moving blood through vital organs, needing neither permission nor forgiveness.

Swank is 10 years into a career that began with a breathtaking, gender-bending performance in Boys Don’t Cry, for which she won the first of her two Academy Awards (the other was for Million Dollar Baby). The challenge of playing Earhart was to stay strictly within a narrow personality while somehow acting like there were no boundaries at all. A finely calibrated performance.

Richard Gere plays Amelia’s husband, George Putnam, the PR maven behind Earhart’s commercial success. He initially saw her as a heroic spokesperson for the inchoate air travel industry. He also knew a brand when he saw one, and used her to sell books and air travel products. A meal ticket, in other words. But Putnam, although a couple of decades Amelia’s senior, also fell in love with her, and kept proposing until she agreed to marry him.

Gere plays Putnam with a genteel, faintly patrician FDR-style accent, a welcome variation on the classy but commercially crass character he played in Chicago (and a hike from his nimble, nuanced work in An Officer and a Gentleman). It’s a role that doesn’t call for very much beyond absolute devotion to the heroine. Like Stanley Tucci playing Julia Child’s husband in “Julie/Julia,” what’s needed are male cups deliberately not runneth over at a female party. Still, quite a serviceable supporting role (both).

Earhart’s relationship with Putnam is complicated by her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), an aviation pioneer about Amelia’s age (and father of writer Gore Vidal). Some of Earhart’s biographers think that Gene was the love of her life although she ultimately chose to be with Putnam; they also talk about Earhart’s close relationships with her sister (who called her ‘Meelie’) and mother, and Putnam’s two offspring from his first marriage, her stepsons. None of this is in the film, hard to fathom from a director whose previous films showed a talent for slowly revealing underlying layers of emotion, some not so pretty. The price of a ticket west across the Atlantic?