The Hollywood Biopic Is Dead, And 'Amelia' Is Just The Movie To Prove It

Hilary Swank (seen here with Ewan McGregor) does admirable work in Amelia, but it's not enough to make up for the basic failures of the form. (Ken Woroner / Fox Searchlight Pictures)

by Glenn McDonald

It's official: The mainstream Hollywood biopic is dead.

With today's release of Amelia, the ought-to-be-compelling story of famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart, the contemporary biopic as a viable cinematic genre should finally be issued its toe tag. Director Mira Nair, working from a script based on not one but two Earhart biographies, manages to reduce the life of one of the 20th century's most fascinating figures to a series of blandly familiar screen conventions.

It's a problem of form. Amelia is done about as well as this type of movie can be done -- but that's the problem. The celebrity biopic has become Hollywood's most tired and predictable genre. If you recall, we were tipped to this problem in 2007 with the very funny mock-biopic Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Walk Hard tackled the subgenre of the musical biopic, but its cautionary lessons can very easily be extrapolated -- and, evidently, ignored.

The end of the road and a possible way forward, after the jump.

It's too bad, because Amelia has a lot going for it. There's the terrific performance by Hilary Swank, who once again provides a virtual clinic on screen acting. She does some amazing technical work here, nailing the particular cadences and mannerisms of 1930s speech. The photography is beautiful -- several bravura sequences show Amelia flying through electrical storms, or diving recklessly to keep her plane from icing over.

But everything is jammed sideways into the conventional biopic template. You have your expositional voiceovers. Your sweeping and intrusive musical score. Your improbably declarative dialogue in which characters establish their motivations. When a suitor proposes marriage, for instance, Amelia's reply -- describing herself blissfully as a free-spirited "vagabond of the air" -- isn't anything anyone would actually say in that situation.

But it does sound like an excellent ninth draft of a screenplay.

Scripts like this don't trust the viewer to infer the moral of the story. Instead, it's all provided in dialogue and musical cues, right before the didactic montage sequence.

Even Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, covering similar ground, occasionally fell into these weary rhythms. The real nadir of the genre may be last winter's sadly deflated Notorious, which distilled the fascinating story of hip-hop star Christopher "Biggie Smalls" Wallace to a procession of repetitive biopic riffs.

Hollywood desperately needs some visionary director to come in and reinvent the form. Last year's weird and wily Bob Dylan alt-biopic I'm Not There was a step in the right direction. By artfully subverting biopic tropes -- casting multiple actors in the lead role, say -- director Todd Haynes gleefully sprinted off in a new direction entirely. Of course, there's always the option of ditching the dramatization approach and making a great documentary instead. Consider Tyson, more interesting by far than any recent biopic.

I suspect film historians may look back and mark Amelia as a watershed moment. Here is a perfectly serviceable and utterly professional Hollywood biopic that hits all the requisite notes. Yet it comes across as so staid, so inert, that it may as well have been assembled by the latest bundle of retail screenwriting software. Actually, I'm pretty sure Apple has an iPhone app for that.