Myrtle is a foul-mouthed and bigoted elderly lady who is rude toward everyone, including her latest young caregiver Season. The truths the two women learn from each other leave both changed forever in Al Mertens’ Thank You, Amelia Earhart.
Thank You, Amelia Earhart is a film about love and patience. It is also a film we have seen many times before. The formula is simple, you tell the story of two people, one is usually white, and the other is black, they are from opposite sides of the tracks and have two completely different personalities. They are forced to spend time together, under unusual circumstances, and slowly begin to learn from each other, they both end up changing for the better before realising that no matter who they are or where they come from, they are not so different after all.
Mary Buss plays Myrtle – an elderly southern lady who, due to recent ill health and difficult behaviour, has been forced to change her carers many times. This brings into her life Season, a young black caregiver played by Merhawit Tsegay, who herself is very headstrong if still quite innocent and has yet to experience the full range of life’s ups and downs. Using flashbacks Myrtle tells Season all about her life experiences, her family, and her lovers. The Amelia Earhart reference comes from Myrtle’s childhood where a young Myrtle, who was 12 when Earhart disappeared, hero-worshipped the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
As director and writer, Al Mertens approaches the film’s obvious flashpoints such as Myrtle’s racism, parental issues, and old age with less of a brush and more of a sledgehammer. He makes his points strongly and obviously, and although we are expecting these subjects to be breached, Mertens tends to hammer them home when a little more shade would have probably been wiser. The timeline also feels a little off, because if Myrtle was 12 when Earhart disappeared that would make her around 97 years old at the start of the film, and, as good as Buss is in the role of Myrtle, without any prosthetics she can’t convince us that she is almost 100. I’m sure if Mertens had more of a budget though that the make-up department would have helped with this aspect. Tsegay as Season is a fine foil to Buss’s grumpy OAP with her character showing a lot of patience based on some close observation and intelligent listening skills.
The main setting takes place in one large two-story home where Mertens’ shots are not particularly dynamic but do a job. When our main characters are chatting he uses a locked-off camera to give us a two-shot and then cuts between them both as they share stories and wicked barbs. Some of the best moments in the film come during the flashbacks scenes where Buss’s young daughter plays the young Myrtle and we see her manipulate her way through different boys of different races who visit her on her farm. There is some cleverness to Mertens’ decision to use different lighting during the flashbacks scenes; the modern care home setting is bright and shiny, whereas the flashbacks to her life in the South are darker, dirtier, and grittier.
There are a couple of issues with Thank You, Amelia Earhart, more variations in shots were needed and the guitar soundtrack feels like it’s from another movie entirely, but Mertens manages to keep it on the right side of melodrama. He also gives us a final scene that, if not totally unexpected and lays on the schmaltz a little too much, is still quite affecting. It’s nice to see a film that ignores current conventions, and even though we’ve been on this journey before, it decides to look to the heart for its answers.
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