Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones in “The Aeronauts”. Photo: Courtesy of Amazon Studios
Directed by: Tom Harper
Screenplay by: Jack Thorne
Story by: Tom Harper and Jack Thorne
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, Himesh Patel, Tom Courtenay
Arizona in Winter brings out a particularly fascinating opportunity, that of hot air balloon rides in the desert. While I’ve not personally done an excursion, I look up to the morning sky and see these small dots and think about what it must be like to be lifted into the air by hot gasses and to be able to experience the air without any other limitations than the basket you’re standing in, or the air you’re riding on.
I applied this same curiosity as James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) and Amelia Rennes (Felicity Jones) take to the air in the 1860’s – set “The Aeronauts” which opens this weekend.
Tom Harper, who co-wrote the story with Jack Thorne and directed the film uses some of the same tropes he developed in “Wild Rose” to tell the story of two people who desperately needed to prove their theories to a world who would not give them the time of day.
More than that though is the adventurous spirit with which Glaisher and Wren go about their adventure into the atmosphere. The time when the film is set, dirigibles are the only way off the ground and no one has a fundamental understanding of how the weather works, but Glaisher does.
In order to prove his theories though, he needs a way up into the air, and that’s where Amelia comes in. We get the sense from the opening frames, as they each try to one-up the other, that there is an unexplored sexual tension between the two. Amelia, a widow is as restrained a character as Redmayne is an actor and yet, Harper manages to get more mileage out of Redmayne because Jones is so effervescent in her determination as Amelia to prove the male-led Royal Society wrong and set a new height record while proving his theories correct.
There is an understated bravery in the adventurous spirit with which Glaisher and Amelia take to the skies supported through flashbacks. Thorne designed them to fill in gaps as the story reflects on what brought our characters to where they are today. These flashbacks are filled with wonderful characters, most notably that of Arthur Glaisher (Tom Courtenay), but do very little to support the modern adventure that Amelia and James are on.
Harper drives a feeling of romanticism between the characters. There is a tension between the two as Amelia, just having come out of a panic attack, tries to upstage James at the beginning of the movie. By the end of the movie, they find that they can rely on one another.
Where the use of flashbacks deter the course of the journey, the special effects more than support Glaisher’s and Amelia’s ambitions, allowing the wonderment of each of their characters’ excitement or horror to leap out of the screen. Nevermore is this present than in the harrowing scene where they realize that they must let the gas out in order to begin a descent. The trouble is that they’ve hit the coldest part of the atmosphere and the cap has frozen shut. In a brilliant moment that plays to our modern sensibilities, Amelia climbs out on to the balloon and manages to de-ice the latch, but not without putting herself in considerable danger.
It is this ambition that appeals to me; that adventurous spirit that captures a “brave new world” so very well. While I’m ambivalent toward the flashbacks, they do ground the characters a bit more, giving each of them a foundation. Amelia’s spitfire attitude is more about Felicity Jones’s performance than it is the character background, which is interesting because, while James Glaisher is a real-life individual who made these feats, Amelia is a completely original character and Jones filled the adventurous spirit with great aplomb.
The effects and the performances are what save “The Aeronauts” from completely deflating the story, but the unnecessary flashbacks put just as much pressure on those performances. Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne shine against the special effects and still come out on top.
2.75 out of 4
