Making a film of Amelia Earhart's life was never going to be easy. Downer endings are a challenge, and inconclusive endings are flat-out problematic, and it's difficult to evoke the grand spirit of adventure when an audience is sitting there wondering if the heroine was killed on impact, starved on a life raft or was eaten by sharks. 
 
 Going out in a blaze of glory is one thing, but an ellipsis followed by a question mark ...? Not very dramatic. 
 
 These challenges could have been surmounted at the drafting stage of "Amelia," had the screenwriters devised some specific purpose or point in revisiting the life of the pioneering aviatrix, who disappeared somewhere over the Pacific in 1937. But what we have in this movie instead is a conventional heroine's tale, about a plucky young American who did brave things and became famous. Director Mira Nair dresses that up with visual grace, with shots of clouds and sky that are beautiful and elusive enough to escape the tinge of cliche. But the basic bones of the story are the problem here. 
 
 Still, it could have been worse. Contrary to what you might expect, the seemingly obligatory scene does not appear: No one says to Richard Gere, who plays Amelia's husband, "Your wife is missing," which means Gere doesn't get to do his usual thing of scrunching up his face and breathing as if he were in a Lamaze class. However, Amelia does get to meet Gore Vidal, the son of her lover Gene Vidal, and she spends an inordinate amount of time calling the boy by name, as if resisting the temptation to address him by his full title, "Little Gore, the future famous novelist." 
 
 Swank, who plays Earhart, looks something like her, and she conveys the charm that everyone says Earhart had but that doesn't come across in still pictures. On the downside, Swank doesn't seem nearly as tough or as serious as Earhart does in photos. The film, which is interspersed throughout with scenes from her last flights, begins Amelia's story in 1928, when she was chosen as a crew member (really just a passenger) on a transatlantic flight. She spent the rest of her life living up to the fame that flight brought her, taking risks and setting records. 
 
 The film is at its best in the air, giving us the flavor of early aviation and dramatizing some of the tense moments from Earhart's travels. But the movie soon pivots from that to concentrate on her personal life, on her marriage to publisher George Putnam (Gere) and her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor). Aside from the obvious - Earhart was distinctive because she was an aviator, not because she had a sex life, so why concentrate on the less interesting element? - there is something just a little phony and cloying about the film's portrayal of the marriage. 
 
 George is supposed to be a wonderful fellow, but he seems creepy, and not just because Gere plays him, though that helps. There's simply something about the whole George-Amelia dynamic that doesn't ring true, either a fault of the script or the actors or of missing information. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, except that the George-Amelia relationship becomes the film's emotional locus. It's a weak one. 
 
 Still, they try. "Amelia" was made with a conscientious regard for the period. Swank and Gere talk like the people in early 1930s newsreels, with accents that have vanished along with that generation. Swank looks uncomfortable speaking that way at times, but she manages. The film's basic material, that is the history, is not without interest. And it must be admitted that every so often - for about 10 seconds every 10 minutes - we get a hint of the movie they wanted to make and hoped they were making: One about the thrill of early aviation and the promise of a young century. 
 
 -- Advisory: This film contains mild sexual situations. 
 
 To hear Mick LaSalle talk about movies, listen to his weekly podcast at sfgate.com/podcasts 
 
 This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle ||||| History can weigh heavily on a filmmaker, and that is what happens with "Amelia," a disappointing rendering of the remarkable life of Amelia Earhart. The pioneering aviatrix lost in flight is a figure so iconic, and director Mira Nair so tentative with her legend, that all the reverence and tiptoeing around grounds a film that should have soared.The life of Earhart, who burst on the scene in 1928 flying airplanes when they were still the province of men, is exactly the sort of saga Nair loves to tell. Themes of the unconventional woman have long found their way into her work, whether powerfully as in "Monsoon Wedding" or lightly in "Vanity Fair."So a pioneering feminist in the hands of a feminist filmmaker should have been a perfect match. But like her subject, the filmmaker gets lost in the clouds.The film begins with the nose of the Electra lifting upward as Earhart -- played by Earhart lookalike Hilary Swank -- sets out on that tragic solo flight of 1937. We see the world as she must have from the cockpit that day, with the land a patchwork of greens and browns spreading out below, the sky endlessly blue, those sweeping vistas giving us a sense of the freedom that fueled Earhart's passion for flying.There is also the hint of trouble in the air, but for the moment, Nair leaves that hanging and takes us back to fill in a few of the blanks of Earhart's life. The country girl who first fell in love with the yellow biplane that swooped over the Kansas fields of her childhood; the woman of quiet determination, who would defy the naysayers and go on to charm the world with her record-breaking flights.Swank, with hair cropped short tucked under the leather flyboy cap and those long lanky limbs, looks the essence of Amelia as she crouches on the wing of a plane, hand aloft in a wave, a smile playing across that strong-boned face. The physical resemblance between the two is striking, enough so that Nair can make good use of newsreel footage from that time.The film narrows its sights to the decade when Earhart captivated the nation, from her first flight across the Atlantic in 1928 until she disappeared in the Pacific in 1937 during her attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Many of the historic details land on the screen in the form of newspaper headlines and newsreel shorts, a device instead of plot and dialogue, which only serves to underscore the weakness of the script by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan.Most of Amelia's interior life we get through passages lifted from her diary, with Swank narrating the many minutes the film devotes to tracing Earhart's travels. The meat of the story begins with her groundbreaking flight over the Atlantic to the shores of Ireland, which Amelia made first as a passenger, then as a pilot. We get a taste of her unaffected appeal as she chats with the surprised Irish farmer, his sheep clustered artfully nearby. But those glimpses of Amelia's humanity come from such an emotional distance that the substance of this substantial woman is lost.For all that Earhart accomplished alone, much of her life was defined by the men who loved her.First in line was George Putnam, a slick promotional genius played by a stylishly smooth Richard Gere. Putnam understood the power of managing an image, and in his own way was as daring and inventive as Amelia. They would marry, although Earhart wasn't keen on the idea, stopping the ceremony until the minister removed the word "obey" from the vows.The passion came with Gene Vidal (yes, Gore's father), played by a debonair but underused Ewan McGregor, an aviation pioneer and a pilot himself, who understood her love of flying and feared her ambition. Though they were both married, the couple would carry on a brief but intense affair that we see little of beyond a relatively chaste kiss in an elevator. More often than not we see Amelia, Putnam and Vidal talking strategy and risks as her career advanced, with a young Gore running around in the background. No detail is too small, too random or too pointless to throw into this already unfocused film.The sinewy strength and controlled aggression that Swank used to such good effect for her Oscar-winning roles in "Boys Don't Cry" and "Million Dollar Baby" is mostly diminished in "Amelia" by a poster-girl smile. So ever-present is that grin, whether in the cockpit, or a cocktail party or on the promotional circuit for everything from luggage to clothes that you worry it has forever lined Swank's face.But we get little of the woman behind the smile. Where is the steely force that drives grand ambition, the fears, the flaws?The final flight and the final hours when she realizes her fate are the stuff of great drama, but you won't find it here. Mostly we see Amelia in flight, touching down around the world like a History Channel travelogue, or seeing small slices of her life unfold like a fashion spread, gorgeous but vacuous -- not exactly the legacy Earhart hoped for or deserves.
– Hilary Swank is superlative as Amelia Earhart, say critics, but the too-conventional movie around her never really engages in what made the aviatrix tick and stays earthbound as a result. Swank is "strangely mesmerizing as Earhart," writes Connie Ogle in the Miami Herald, but director Mira Nair's biopic "never—unlike the famous aviatrix—takes chances." It's "big-hearted yet by-the-numbers." The audience never sees the "steely force that drives grand ambition, the fears, the flaws," complains Betsy Sharkey at the Los Angeles Times. "Mostly we see Amelia in flight, touching down around the world like a History Channel travelogue, or seeing small slices of her life unfold like a fashion spread, gorgeous but vacuous." At frustratingly infrequent intervals, Mick LaSalle writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, "we get a hint of the movie they wanted to make and hoped they were making: One about the thrill of early aviation and the promise of a young century."