Strong female characters are hard to come by in the movies, regardless of the target audience. Marketing theory holds that the young men who flock to cinemas aren't looking for any kind of character strength, but that's no excuse for vapidity (hello Transformers). Women are often simply window dressing - the houseplants - of major release mainstream cinema. When women are central to the story in a popular hit, industry pundits sit back and call it a fluke.

So what's an actress to do? The choices are limited and the most popular option seems to be take the best of the bad batch that's offered and repeat past successes (hello Julia Roberts). Some get lucky enough to fall in with a director that "gets" women and writes complete characters. Some simply decide they'll create their own opportunities, though that can backfire, too (hello Katherine Heigl). To that end, veteran television star Kim Hye-ja is front-and-center in Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho's (The Host) latest, and Hilary Swank (Million Dollar Baby) went out and produced her own starring vehicle.

In Mother, a woman (Kim, utterly mesmerizing) takes it upon herself to prove her mildly mentally handicapped son Do-joon (Won Bin, Taegukki) is not guilty of a schoolgirl's murder. That may seem simple enough, but Mother is such a zealously overprotective woman that her mission quickly falls into dangerous and deadly territory. She dances her own fine line between right and wrong, good intentions and fanaticism, when she realizes her son isn't the fragile child she believes him to be. Swinging wildly between character study, comedy (to wit, the crime recreation wherein the dummy victim can't keep its head on) and thriller, Mother is a primer on maternity's shadier side.

Bong has set Mother in the kind of provincial Korean town he used in his brilliant Memories of Murder. As the film progresses layers are pulled back, revealing a complex core of corruption and twisted morals that makes Mother feel vindicated in her pursuit. Mother is, without a doubt, Kim's film, and Bong has concocted another genre mash-up in support of his central character. Mother is never identified by name; she acts as a proxy for the idea of "mother" more than an individual person. Bong takes the image of the nurturer to its extreme, and comes out with a portrait of desperation and ferocity born of a secretive and stifling environment.

In doing so Kim runs a gamut of emotions that often sit in opposition to each other. Bong willfully and cleverly subverts Kim's existing matronly persona and draws out a performance that's infuriating, heartbreaking, and frightening. We are asked to understand Mother, if not approve of her, and for the most part we do. Her progression from browbeaten widow to ruthless protector is perfectly summarized in Bong's impeccable visuals, particularly during a solitary stroll through a field that bookends the film. Rightly so, the scene plays out in a new light before and after the story has been told.

Swank proves not quite as fortunate as Kim in Mira Nair's (Salaam Bombay) biographical film about the last years of Amelia Earhart's life. Amelia is as pedestrian a film as Earhart's life was pioneering. Beginning around the Depression and Earhart's first trip across the Atlantic and ending when she and navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) vanish over the Pacific in 1937, Nair and writers Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan breeze through Earhart's life in a pastiche of singular moments: Her first solo trans-Atlantic flight, her marriage to publisher George Putnam, her involvement with the first New York-Washington shuttle service, and so on.

After the film is over, whatever compelled Earhart to take on the (still) unabashedly male aviation industry remains as mysterious as her disappearance. There are some platitudes about the "freedom" of flight and the "right" of all women to take to the skies, but beyond that (and a vague nod to Earhart's progressive nature in her personal relationships), who she was is tenuous. Amelia the film is given no context, and so Amelia the person lacks context. A few young women are shown expressing admiration, but it ends there. Instead, the film concentrates its energies on her roundabout romance with Putnam (Richard Gere) and dalliance with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), effectively neutering any meager statements it does make.

As Earhart, Swank imitates the pilot's famed Cagney-esque delivery and comes off more as a sketch comedy subject than a gender role-buster. Why the appropriation of the era's traditionally masculine speech? What was with the short hair and pants? How did she reconcile her femininity with her place in aviation history? Who knows? In Amelia, no one can be bothered to ask. Swank, with her penchant for just this kind of challenging material, forged a plum opportunity for herself and then frittered it away. I can well imagine what Earhart would have said about that.

Mother and Amelia opened in Hong Kong Thursday.

(HK Edition 11/21/2009 page4)