'Amelia' (PG): (out of four)

Told in poetic voiceovers amid puffy clouds, the movie "Amelia" sputters like the Electra airplane that fails to get off the ground three quarters through the movie. The movie avoids a total crash and burn, as it is saved by its production design and a true-life character whose legend continues to fascinate even 50 years after her disappearance.

Screenwriters Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, working from two Earhart biographies, scratch the surface of "Lady Lindy." The film covers a distinct time period in Earhart's life, beginning with the 1928 flight that made her famous as the first woman to cross the Atlantic (she was a passenger, however), her marriage to George Putnam (Richard Gere), her affair with pilot Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor) and her doomed endeavor piloting her own plane around the world in 1937.

In the movie, Earhart struggles to get noticed, although we never really learn what drove her to have such a passion for aviation except a short flashback of her running next to her father's plane on a Kansas farm. Swank as Earhart says, "My daddy had the wanderlust, and that's what's kept me moving." We're fast-forwarded 30 years later, losing any context of what happened before she announces to Putnam on her first meeting that she wants to be the first woman to fly around the world.

The missing pieces of the complex character are made all the more sketchy as Hilary Swank, channeling Katharine Hepburn, struggles to make Earhart earnest, but ends up creating a cardboard cut-out. Overly charming and overbearingly cute, Swank never captures the toughness or seriousness that was the fuel behind Earhart's unstoppable drive.

This was a woman who insisted her husband sign a prenuptial agreement before their wedding ceremony, and even after her marriage wanted to enjoy her own freedoms. When she tells George that neither of them should be beholden to "any medieval code of faithfulness," there is no hint of a confident swagger, and it's hard to decipher if she's dead serious or half-threatening (Earhart was serious).

Director Mira Nair ("The Namesake," "Monsoon Wedding") loses her footing in this film as she tries but fails to find her way through the wreckage. Her usual beautiful pastiches are replaced by paint-by-number shots. And the tension, which should be left to the characters on screen, instead feels like it's coming from the actors themselves: the ghost of Earhart trying to coax her way out of a stilted Swank, and the listless Gere never becoming believable as a public relations pitbull.

While we know the story is true, this Hollywood mock-up of a Depression-era setting is truly transparent. Swank's hair, at one point flecked with highlights, is too sprayed and perfect to be real, while the scenes of faraway places like Calcutta look like a pasteboard movie set.

Time ticks away, but moves ever so slowly with shot after shot of Swank in the cockpit, sun-drenched and freckled. We are there to share her delight in her desire to "be a vagabond of the air," and become deeply concerned as gas runs short and communications fail. Yet, there isn't much we're made to actually care about. The drama of the failed flight is played out with Earhart losing contact with the Coast Guard over the ocean, and a pilot to ground control "I can't hear you" that runs too long.

Perhaps the best part of the film is to see the real Earhart in old film reel clips, bounding out of the cockpit of her Electra, greeting fans, and waving to an adoring public. This is the real Amelia whose spunk is but a fleeting star in this broad-brushed biopic. Sadly, her spirit remains lost at sea.