LITTLE ROCK — Amelia Earhart, the American aviator who disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 while trying to become the first woman to fly around the globe, didn’t wear bodices, as far as I can tell from the new biographical movie starring Hilary Swank. If Earhart had, it’s a good bet that Richard Gere, who plays her sensitive, supportive, husband, George Palmer Putnam, would have politely removed an unmentionable or two amid the civilized yearning.

Romance is in the air in Amelia, or at least in the score, which works hard to inject some emotional coloring into the proceedings. The music screams melodramatic excess.

Alas, excesses of any pleasurable kind are absent from this exasperatingly dull production. The director Mira Nair, keeps a tidy screen - it’s all very neat and carefully scrubbed. Bathed in golden light, Amelia and G.P. are as pretty as a framed picture and as inert.

Earhart became a celebrity during her two decades in the air, setting records and grabbing headlines. In 1928 she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. She wasn’t allowed to pilot the plane (“I was just baggage.”) Four years later she took the controls to become thefirst woman to fly solo across the pond. She then tried to circle the globe.

Earhart wasn’t a martyr. She vanished doing what she loved best: touching the clouds. At the time she was 39, seemingly content in her marriage or at peace with its compromises, and publicly adored. An argument can be made that her death was acatastrophe but Amelia won’t or can’t rise to the tragic occasion. The filmmakers spend so much time turning her into a dopey romantic figure that they never give her the animating, vital will or even much of a personality that might explain how a Kansas tomboy turned Boston social worker took to the skies and encouraged other women to chart their own courses.

She did marry, at 33. Nair recreates the simple ceremony - she dutifully spins all the greatest hits - and shares Earhart’s prenuptial letter to G.P. “I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly,” Earhart wrote. “Please let us not interfere with the other’s work or play.” The movie reveals that some of that play involved an aviation entrepreneur, Gene Vidal (EwanMcGregor,), whose son, a future writer named Gore (William Cuddy), asked her to marry his father.

Instead of digging deep into the complexities of her character, the filmmakers cram Earhart’s life into a biographical template. In this mold the thickness of life is thinned until it’s as manageable and as easy to shoot and to sell as a bulleted checklist. Amelia flies. Ameliameets G.P.

With her rangy figure, Swank fills Earhart’s coveralls and leather jackets nicely. But there’s little to the performance other than the actress’s natural earnestness. Gere holds your attention with a screen presence so recessive that it creates its own gravitational pull.

The actors don’t make a persuasive fit, despite all their long stares and infernal smiling.

Amelia78Cast: Hilary Swank, Richard Gere, EwanMcGregor Director: Mira Nair Rating: PG, for some sensuality, language, thematic elements and smoking Running time: 111 minutes

MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 10/30/2009