TV Review : Re-Examining the Tantalizing ‘Earhart’

Amelia Earhart . . . just the sound of her name evokes clouds and wings, impenetrable mystery and heroism.

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What is it about this aviator that continues to grab our imaginations?

“Amelia Earhart--The Final Flight” dramatizes a lot of the answers. A TNT cable movie that itself takes flight, it features captivating performances by Diane Keaton as the single-minded flier and Bruce Dern as her cajoling, Svengali husband (publisher G. P. Putnam) who promoted and lionized the reclusive Earhart into a media superstar and one of our first modern American heroines.

She wasn’t nicknamed “Lady Lindy” for nothing.

Centered on the last two years of Earhart’s life, the artful script (by Anna Zandor) flaps together the public and private lives of Earhart, underscoring her unconventional marriage, her temper and her foolish, reckless indifference to mastering navigation or the use of her cockpit radio. She drives her pilot teacher, the famous stunt pilot Paul Mantz (Paul Guilfoyle), a little crazy.

Keaton, with her shagged hair and ‘30s fashions cut just so, creates a complex heroine who is far from an angelic figure.

But the movie’s achievement, including a spectacular opening flashback that sets up the whole movie and looks like something Ingmar Bergman would have helmed, runs far deeper. Directed by Yves Simoneau, its triumph is to show why--more than half a century after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, slipped from radio contact in their silver Lockheed Electra somewhere over the South Pacific--we still thrill to the story of Earhart’s ill-fated round-the-world Equator flight during what was still the dawn of aviation in 1937.

The production, using as source material the Smithsonian-published biography “Amelia Earhart” by Doris L. Rich, takes the position that Earhart wasn’t the hottest female pilot around. We see that she didn’t know enough about the use of her plane’s radio to save them when they were approaching Howland Island, which, in this scenario, they never find. As for the old rumors about Earhart crashing and surviving as a prisoner of the Japanese, forget it.

* “Amelia Earhart--The Final Flight” airs at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. Sunday on TNT and repeats June 19, 20, 24 and 26.