‘Amelia’ never really quite soars

There’s something about “Amelia.” But it’s not enough.

Although today’s biopic is about history’s most legendary aviatrix and boasts gorgeous production values, the Hilary Swank star vehicle never really takes off.

It’s not like the raw material of Amelia Earhart’s life doesn’t provide sufficient cinematic fodder for director Mira Nair (“The Namesake,” “Monsoon Wedding”). But the Indian filmmaker takes a quintessentially American drama of rugged individualism and turns it into a detached, disappointingly passionless hagiography.

With a perfunctory screenplay by executive producer Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, based on the books “East to the Dawn” by Susan Butler and “The Sound of Wings” by Mary S. Lovell, it tells through dialogue and story, but never shows, what made Earhart an icon of aeronautic advancement and protofeminist independence. We get no real flavor of the plucky personality — the quirkiness, even the recklessness — it must have taken to revolutionize those two movements.

The epic’s plot does tick through the high points: Between 1928 and her famous disappearance over the Pacific in 1937, she set a number of flying speed and altitude records for women. She became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger, the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo, the first woman to fly the United States coast to coast nonstop, and was on the last leg of what would have been a groundbreaking flight to circumnavigate the globe when she reportedly died at age 40.

During that same period, she pioneered the cause to turn the then-extreme sport of flying into mainstream transportation. She bucked the subordinate gender role in her unconventional marriage to her manager, book publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere). Almost without apology, she took a lover: fellow aviation industry booster Gene Vidal (played by Ewan McGregor), father of the boy who would grow up to be illustrious writer Gore Vidal.

And, at a time when they weren’t supposed to do the “big things,” she thrilled and inspired millions of early-20th-century women in a way that would eventually help transform society.

Meanwhile, the movie entertains none of the juicy rumors that made Earhart an enduring mystery (A lesbian? A spy for FDR? Still alive on an atoll somewhere?). And though Swank is a finely tuned actress who communicates emotion without treacle, both she and this production lack the larger-than-life spirit and specific allure to give “Amelia” wings.