Felicity Jones' Fire Keeps The Aeronauts Airborne [TellurideReview]

TELLURIDE – Despite her 5’3 frame there is a fire in Felicity Jones that has helped propel her into becoming one of the toughest actresses working in mainstream film. Over the past three years, she’s battled an evil Empire a galaxy far, far away and portrayed the iconic Ruth Bader Ginsberg (name a character braver than the Notorious R.B.G.). In her latest endeavor, Tom Harper’s “The Aeronauts,” which debuted at the 2019 Telluride Film Festival this weekend,  she’ll legitimately have you afraid for her personal safety as she dangles from a balloon thousands of feet in the air. Fine, maybe the balloon was on a sound stage a good chunk of the time and just 2,000 feet during one exterior sequence, but Jones still finds a way to transform the fictional Amelia Wren, an amalgamation of a number of 19th century female pilots, into one of her most physically challenging and memorable performances.

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Of course, the fact Wren isn’t actually a part of the historical events that are the basis for “Aeronauts” is more than disconcerting. The Jack Thorne screenplay is centered on a Sept. 5, 1982 balloon flight that found English Aeronauts James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell soaring to an unprecedented 37,000 feet, a world record both men held for 45 years. Glaisher is portrayed by Jones’ Oscar-winning “Theory of Everything” co-star Eddie Redmayne while Coxwell, a hero in his own right, is effectively replaced by Wren. The result is a hodgepodge of a story that only really works when Glaisher and Wren are in the sky. And when they are it’s absolutely gorgeous.

Using a combination of footage shot in the air and on soundstages, production designers David Hindle and Christian Huband, cinematographer George Steel as well as Harper’s digital effects team are able to seamlessly create a journey that appears both realistic and slightly fantastical at the same time. And when things get dicey over 30,000 feet, Harper is able to finally generate the necessary narrative tension that the film has been missing. Especially considering how inert most of the set up to the flight itself is in the first place.

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Told in increasingly annoying flashbacks, we learn that Glaisher, a meteorologist, has been ridiculed by his peers for his insistence that with enough knowledge, it’s possible to learn how to predict the weather. Glaisher believes the best way to test his theories is by taking an expedition as high as he can in a gas-powered weather balloon. He’s assisted by the loyal John Trew (Himesh Patel), who frankly doesn’t do much but try to track his voyage from the ground and is insistent on proving his methodology before his father (Tom Courtenay) falls deeper into the throes of dementia.

Wren, on the other hand, is haunted by the death of her husband, Pierre Rennes (Vincent Perez), who was also an expert Aeronaut and her co-pilot. She eventually agrees to take on Glaisher’s expedition despite the reticence of her sister Antonia (Phoebe Fox), who feels she needs to find inner peace instead of constantly escaping her problems by taking to the skies. Much of this conflict is textbook period drama and simply drags the film down. That despite the fact the film has a spectacular sendoff (with glitter and a parachuting dog, no less) with Wren and Glaisher heading skyward in front of a large carnival audience.

Thankfully, Jones finds a way to transcend the scripted material and have you rooting for Wren when their voyage is in truly dire straits. Redmayne’s character has his own heroic moment, but it’s almost anticlimactic compared to what his co-star pulls off. In many ways, Redmayne’s performance seems tempered to support Jones. A potentially unexpected payback for Jones who propped up Redmayne in his career-making turn as Stephen Hawking in the aforementioned “Everything.” And beyond the stellar aerial sequences, if “Aeronauts” proves anything its that this isn’t the last time we’ll see Jones and Redmayne on screen together again. [B]

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