In Theaters: Amelia

Every scene in Amelia, Mira Nair's gooey biopic of record-setting female pilot Amelia Earhart, is glazed with a kind of Cheez Whiz glow. The actors, the airplanes, and the blue sky itself seem bathed in the stuff, an effect I imagine is supposed to signal "prestige picture" but just made me want to scrub down the screen. God knows I wish I could cleanse my mind of the sugar lumps of narration and treacle streams of dialogue, or at least cut them with some of the salt you know the actual Amelia Earhart, a dynamic if arguably foolhardy woman, had coming from her pores.

Hilary Swank, clonked with a bizarre helmet of hair and speaking in an ersatz "movie" accent, plays Amelia as a sort of gracious robot who's programmed to fly, smile, and interrupt moments of confrontation with corn pone anecdotes from her Kansas childhood (with a swollen music cue, naturally). The first such moment comes when she is facing down the pilot hired to fly her across the Atlantic in 1928. He's surly and considers her an uppity piker, a situation she handles by telling the story of her drunk daddy, whom she loved unconditionally and who disappointed her throughout her life. Doesn't make much sense, but I guess they had to fit it in somewhere.

Earhart became an instant celebrity after essentially manning the jump seat on a trans-Atlantic flight -- an indication of just how exotic and dangerous air travel was during that period. But Nair doesn't give any real sense of those dangers, or the logistics behind prepping and piloting such planes (several of which look almost comically flimsy, which is not to say unrealistic). As a result we don't understand and ultimately can't really care why a plane does or doesn't get off the ground, or why a pilot would take off with insufficient fuel, or how skill came into play in those early voyages. Instead, time is spent on Earhart's relationship with publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere), who minted Earhart as one of his properties, organizing her first flight so that she could write a bestselling book about it. Earhart used that leverage to actually fly herself.

It's hard to revel in Earhart's first major accomplishment -- the first solo flight across the Atlantic made by a woman -- because Nair infuses it with all the dramatic tension of a stalled ride on the G train. Although that flight took place in 1931 and Earhart became a sort of beacon of perseverance for a weary nation, the film's only reference to the period's social and political context occurs in a literal drive-by form: On her way to some fabulous gala or other, Amelia looks out the window as they pass hordes of homeless men warming themselves at the requisite flaming trash cans. She makes a drippy remark about having so much while so many are ruined, then finds cheer in taking Eleanor Roosevelt (Cherry Jones) on a joyride over D.C., piloting the plane in her opera gloves.

Putnam and Earhart marry, despite the latter's protests that she is "not the marrying kind" and the clear lack of chemistry them. Nair makes a laughably dainty reference to Earhart's suspected bisexuality; admiring the beauty of a woman nearby while chatting with her lover Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), she suggests obliquely that while she used to kick for the other team every now and then, she hung up her cleats long ago. What her fans and intimates made of her distinctly androgynous aspect (and during a distinctly gender-conscious time) is overlooked, and for a woman who told her fiancé that she could never be faithful (and, as Judith Thurman points out in her recent, churlish look at the Earhart story in the New Yorker, "made good on her threat") Swank's Amelia telegraphs utter sexlessness.

If Nair were able to convey the degree to which flying subsumed Earhart's passions, this might be forgiven (at least as far as the film is concerned) but Amelia seems too loaded down with polished dignity for excitement of any kind. It's like Nair forgot that the story she's telling cannot be reduced to a series of self-contained, glassine tableaux, or flaccid exit lines, but rather is a narrative that exists along the time-space continuum -- one that people would actually have to sit through.

In that respect, the depiction of Amelia's final hurrah -- a flight around the world with only her navigator, Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) -- could not be less compelling. A counter of how many miles Amelia has "to go" has been running throughout the film, and I found myself desperately willing the numbers down. The last notes I wrote, with easily 30 minutes "to go," were "just die already." If wishing death upon a feminist icon and one of the 20th century's most famous individuals is what Mira Nair and writer Ron Bass had in mind, they should be proud of themselves. I know I'm not.