Film Review By Michael Phillips, Tribune Newspapers Critic

The Amelia Earhart biopic "Amelia" is not a bad movie, but it is distressingly ordinary for such an extraordinary subject. In everything from "Monsoon Wedding" to "Mississippi Masala" to the Thackeray adaptation "Vanity Fair," director Mira Nair has dramatized and celebrated risk-taking women and lives lived outside the strictures of convention. But a director can do only so much with a script (by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan) that feels like it's on the runway, waiting, even when it's up in the air.

Played by an aptly cast and game Hilary Swank, Earhart becomes a checklist of Historical Legend accomplishments. The film concentrates on the late 1920s, beginning with her ties - business, then personal, then marital - with publisher and public-relations pioneer George Putnam, played by Richard Gere, continuing through Earhart's 1937 disappearance, with navigator Fred Noonan, over the Pacific.

Judging from one of the screenplay's two cited inspirations, Susan Butler's Earhart biography "East to the Dawn," the film hits the main points without much regard for the revealing detail. Much of the Kansas-born Earhart's breathless life has been stripped away in favor of her (probable) affair with fellow pilot and Washington, D.C., politico Gene Vidal (Gore's father), played by Ewan McGregor, and that relationship's impact on Earhart's marriage. It's certainly a start, and with a more persuasive telling, it might've been more than enough. But "Amelia" feels tame and conventional, and cliches stick to her like barnacles in this treatment.

"Look how free they are!" Earhart marvels, flying over African giraffes running like the wind. She probably did say things like this, but the movie's excessive Hallmarkian streak makes a fairly weak case for such sentiments. Likewise, Gere's Putnam has one last long-distance conversation with Swank's Earhart:

Putnam: "After the 4th we're going home."

Earhart: "Where's that?"

Putnam: "For me ... anywhere you are."

Nair and her collaborators work hard to capture the photogenic allure and swoony appeal of prewar flight. The results are no disgrace. But struggling against a prosaic text, Nair's atmospheric fluidity as a filmmaker is in short supply. Whatever you imagine when you hear the phrase "standard biopic treatment," that's what you get in this depiction of Earhart's short, tantalizing life, lived between the spotlight and the blissful isolation of what she loved best.

MPAA rating: PG (for some sexuality, language, thematic elements and smoking).

Running time: 1:51.

Cast: Hilary Swank (Amelia Earhart); Richard Gere (George P. Putnam); Ewan McGregor (Gene Vidal); Christopher Eccleston (Fred Noonan); Joe Anderson (Bill); Cherry Jones (Eleanor Roosevelt); Mia Wasikowska (Elinor Smith).

Credits: Directed by Mira Nair; written by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, based on the books "East to the Dawn" by Susan Butler and "The Sound of Wings" by Mary S. Lovell; produced by Ted Waitt, Kevin Hyman and Lydia Dean Pilcher. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release.

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