Earhart tale ‘Amelia’ circles, never lands

Considering the risks Amelia Earhart took, losing her life in the call of aviation, Hilary Swank and director Mira Nair don't put much on the line in their film biography "Amelia."

Swank and Nair play it safe, leaving Earhart as remote and muted as she is in the black-and-white photos and news footage at the film's end.

"Amelia" is a biopic on autopilot. We get the facts of Earhart's pioneering achievements, her marriage to her promoter (Richard Gere), her fling with a fellow pilot (Ewan McGregor). And we get pretty pictures of airplanes in flight.

But this dowdy movie rarely embodies Earhart's passions, whether for flying or for the men in her life. Swank's Earhart repeatedly tells people she has to fly or die. Yet when she's in the air, she's as stiff and closed-off as a passenger stuck in a middle coach seat on a trans-Atlantic flight.

Much of the fault lies in the screenplay by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, a script remarkably based on not one, but two Earhart biographies. That should have given the filmmakers a surfeit of material.

Instead, "Amelia" plays like a CliffsNotes summation of Earhart's life, the dialogue ranging from languid to soporific, the majesty of her moments in flight trivialized by empty voice-overs from Swank: "Flying lets me move in three dimensions," "Who wants a life imprisoned in safety?"

In stumbling, choppy fashion, the movie intercuts between Earhart's doomed last flight around the world in 1937 and the achievements leading up to it during the previous decade -- her Atlantic and Pacific crossings, her mentoring of female fliers, her efforts to establish regional passenger shuttle service.

Lovely aerial images, landscapes and rich sets and costumes are the strengths.

All the other components for an engaging chronicle are there: a grand life that ends in tragedy, epic mystery, period drama that offers the chance to craft glorious images, and fascinating characters.

A sturdy supporting cast includes Christopher Eccleston as the navigator who disappeared with Earhart on her final flight over the Pacific, and Cherry Jones, who briefly enlivens the film as Eleanor Roosevelt on a night flight with Earhart.

Then there's Swank. As Earhart, she exposes what could be her prime limitation: lack of range.

Swank can tear up the screen in raw street drama, such as her two Oscar winners ("Boys Don't Cry" and "Million Dollar Baby"), but she's miserably out of her skin as the stately Earhart. Her performance is drab, distant, utterly uninvolving, despite the striking physical resemblance she manages to bear with the flier.

"Amelia" flirts with potentially interesting aspects of Earhart's story -- a torn conscience over her personal success during the Depression, the frivolity endured as a spokesmodel for luggage, cameras, even waffle irons to help finance her flying pursuits.

Sadly, these moments are tossed in to no purpose, like stuffy airport layovers in really interesting destinations you wish you had the time to explore.