Word: swanking
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...Mira Nair's pretty but disappointing biopic Amelia, there's a scene in which Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) laments the shallow nature of the two questions repeatedly posed by her adoring public. It's not long after the 1928 transatlantic flight that made her a household name, and she says all anyone wants to know is "Where are you going next?" and "What did you wear...
...gentle lament, because the Earhart brought to the screen by Nair and Swank is a gracious lady, magnanimous and humble. She quotes Carl Sandburg, takes care to enthusiastically greet the little people while making history - "Well, hello, sheep!" she says, descending from the cockpit in an Irish meadow - and, above all, beams beatifically at the world at large. (See the top 10 biopics of all time...
Part of that problem lies with Swank. She is undeniably the most physically right American actress to play Earhart. Everything about her looks the part: the tousled hair, the toothy smile, that slim but womanly physique. Swank could have been handed a leather jacket and stepped right into the cockpit - although the painted-on freckles are a nice touch - and this intense resemblance unfairly vests us in the notion that Earhart will spring to life onscreen...
...will you be seeing Amelia 2: Lost and Found. The Earhart movie, originally to have been directed by Phillip Noyce, with Cate Blanchett rumored to play Amelia Earhart, was finally made with Hilary Swank starring and India-born, Harvard-educated Mira Nair behind the camera. It happens that, in every recent year divisible by five, Swank has won the Academy Award for Best Actress: in 2000 for Boys Don,t Cry and 2005 for Million Dollar Baby. Numerology suggested another Swank statuette in 2010. But who, exactly, was supposed to pay to see her as The Aviatrix? Earhart's plane...
...Amelia” offers an opportunity for the same experience. It is visually sumptuous, easy to understand, and endowed with the simple romanticism of a Capra film that Earhart might have watched herself. With any other director, it might have become a dark and melodramatic Hilary Swank vehicle. And although some will criticize “Amelia” for not being that, perhaps this is just the kind of film we needed right...