OPENS: Friday 10/23

Hilary Swank certainly works hard playing famed aviatrix and early feminist Amelia Earhart, who died at 39 flying around the world in 1937. But Mira Nair's pedestrian biopic tries to do so much — the plot includes the Great Depression, the birth of aviation and Earhart's history with her alcoholic dad — that it never achieves intimacy with the heroine. Plus, there's little spark with her Svengali, George Putnam, played by Richard Gere, who seems more like a benign grandpa than a dashing lover (when Earhart takes up with Ewan McGregor's pilot, the audience is more relieved than scandalized). And it doesn't help that the three stars have to recite lines that would shame a Hallmark card. The best scenes are during Earhart's risky and breathless airplane flights -- particularly those without dialogue.

-- THELMA ADAMS

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