First review in for Amelia

Mira Nair’s upcoming Academy Award’s bait “Amelia” is slipping down on the radar and leaving questions unanswered in people’s minds. While the film is beginning to hit theaters slowly, there is no official review up for the movie. This continues on with a large lack of press that could shine a light on the film’s quality past the assumed stellar work by two time Oscar winner Hilary Swank and perennial snubbed actor Richard Gere.  Today this film’s first official review has come in from The Hollywood Reporter’s own Ray Bennett:

Freckle-faced, prairie-voiced and fiercely independent, Hilary Swank’s depiction of aviator Amelia Earhart in Mira Nair’s biographical film “Amelia” is of a high order. It ranks with recent real-life portrayals of Ray Charles by Jamie Foxx and Truman Capote by Philip Seymour Hoffman and could be similarly awards-bound.

The classically structured bio will appeal to grown-ups, history buffs and lovers of aeronautics, but in showing how the flier was one of the most lauded celebrities of her time, it also might appeal to youngsters. Smart marketing will expose the film to students and educators, and Swank’s sparkling portrayal could help attract younger women.

Stephanie Carroll’s handsome production design re-creates the 1920s and ’30s vividly, and Stuart Dryburgh’s cinematography captures the wild sensation of being alone high in the sky. Composer Gabriel Yared’s orchestral score — muscular in the aerial scenes, jovial where it needs to be and foreboding in its evocation of Earhart’s fate — ranks with his Academy Award-winning music for “The English Patient.”

The screenplay by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan is based on two books about Earhart — Susan Butler’s “East to the Dawn” and Elgin Long’s “Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved” — and is almost old-fashioned in its linear path. It provides as much information as is needed for those not familiar with the character without expositional clutter while taking time to show the woman’s no-nonsense approach to intimacy as well as the business of flying.

(The rest of the review can be read here: THR)

Aside from the film’s rave review, has the damage already been done with “Amelia”? Is it already knocked off most people’s Oscar lists, or can the once presumed nominee become a dark horse?