When Amelia Earhart, the world’s most famous aviatrix, disappeared in midair on July 2, 1937, somewhere over the Pacific between New Guinea and a Howland Island refueling station, 22,000 miles into the first equatorial flight around the world, she became the greatest unsolved mystery in aviation history. Why has it taken so long to get her story on the screen? Shirley MacLaine tried in vain for years, and others experienced the kind of daunting challenges that could only be equaled by Amelia herself. Here, at last, is the biopic we’ve been waiting for, neatly wrapped up in a broad but sketchy screenplay by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, directed by India’s Mira Nair and starring diligent, indefatigable two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. It has beautiful cinematography, a star performance that is shocking in its authenticity, a careful eye for nuance and detail and an irresistible blend of action and romance that should spell automatic success. I am sad to report that the one thing Amelia doesn’t have is excitement. The real Amelia had gonads. Amelia has none. It’s a respectable film that is too meticulous to be dull, but the way Ms. Swank plays her, she’s an icon so aware of her self-important image that she couldn’t be blasted out of her complacency with a hydrogen bomb.

This Amelia is a spirited, dauntless, reckless woman with blinders on, but curiously unemotional even in the face of the ultimate crisis. When she runs out of fuel and faces her own mortality, her tough, heavy-drinking and basically unshakable navigator, Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston), sweats, shakes and starts praying. But Amelia is as stoic as Lincoln. You want to pinch her. The light dawns. Maybe it’s this sense of marble-faced, dispassionate tranquility that made a cinematic dossier on the life of Amelia Earhart so resistant to adaptation in the past. There is evidence here that despite her heroics, she just wasn’t the stuff of movie heroines. You don’t really learn much about her growing up in Kansas. You just know she’s in love with the freedom of flying (cut to birds), the independence of the sky (cut to clouds) and the beauty of airplanes (other girls were attracted to boys; Amelia hung out in hangars). Following the success of Lindbergh, she finds the key to fame in a man’s profession when she is sponsored by eccentric publishing tycoon George Putnam (Richard Gere) to become the first lady pilot to cross the Atlantic, but gets no further than a segment from Boston to Newfoundland. The movie chronicles the weather problems and near-death escapes from open doors that would have sent other women to the nearest secretarial school for safety. Not Amelia. On her first solo Atlantic crossing, in 1932, from Boston to Ireland, she lands by mistake in a sheep pasture in Wales, but it results in worldwide publicity, dinner at the White House, endorsements for Eastman Kodak, a series of best-selling books, her own brand of Amelia Earhart luggage, a line of fashion styles at Macy’s and a close, lasting friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt (Cherry Jones), whom she takes for midnight rides in the cockpit. Idolized, celebrated and toasted as “Lady Lindy,” she makes enough money to finance her flying expeditions and purchase the love of her life—the famed twin-engine, orange and silver Lockheed L-10 Electra airplane in which she eventually disappears in 1937. She believes in herself to the exclusion of sex, marriage and the distraction of human relationships, but finally manages to have two affairs—with the controversial Putnam, whom she reluctantly marries in 1931, and with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), aeronautics executive and the father of Gore Vidal. Both affairs have to be predicated on the promise of independence and a minimum of emotion. (Amelia loves her Electra more than her husband or her lover.) She won’t rest until she’s flown around the globe, although many women pilots had died trying it. Despite faulty landing gear, electrical storms, sleep deprivation and other health risks, she and Fred Noonan leave Miami in June 1937, backed by Putnam’s love, loyalty and money. Driven and determined to prove something to the world—and to herself—Amelia almost makes it, ignoring Noonan’s advice, taking off from Calcutta in a monsoon and shrugging off her detractors’ accusations of being a crazy, irresponsible, foolish, fame-seeking celebrity. Based on this movie’s research, you begin to agree. Halfway between New Guinea and California, the radio transmitter goes dead, cutting off all signals, and a dead battery in the U.S. Navy signal transmitter makes it impossible for her to receive any incoming instructions. It was the last anyone heard of Amelia Earhart. They’ve been looking for her ever since.

Lots of facts, lots of calendar entries and a collage of information from aeronautical files provides the necessary tools for a documentary, but not enough heart-pounding adrenaline for a tragic historical film biography. There is so little warmth in the character of Amelia that I’m not sure I like her very much. I liked the movie a great deal more, in spite of its shortcomings, but the most amazing thing about it is Hilary Swank. With short russet hair, a nose covered with freckles and a total abstention from makeup, she looks exactly like the subject. Then, miraculously, when you see actual newsreel footage of Amelia Earhart, she looks so astoundingly like Hilary Swank you’ll think you’re seeing double.

rreed@observer.com

Not long ago, in the pages of Foreign Affairs, he wrote that "the neoconservatives are a twin of al Qaeda"-the kind of rhetorical Molotov cocktail seldom tossed by the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations.

On this evening, he was about to throw another one: into the already highly emotional battle at Columbia over anti-Semitism at the university.

Among the graduate students and faculty members that packed the top-floor conference room that night was a young correspondent from The New York Sun, which had ardently been fanning the story of the handful of Jewish students who have said they were ridiculed for expressing support of Israel in some classes taught by professors in the school's department of Middle Eastern Studies.

The first speaker, a former university provost, gave a windy speech warning of a "rising tide of anti-intellectualism." Then Mr. Mamdani rose, and announced he was planning to confront the issue directly. He was wearing a smart dark suit, his royal blue shirt open at the collar, his curly gray hair slightly mussed.

"The accusation involved is the worst you can hurl at anyone in contemporary American society," he said, his voice audibly seething with indignation. Mr. Mamdani, who is from an Indian Muslim background, had not been accused, but he was passionate in his belief that outside groups, "with skills honed elsewhere in the Empire," were mounting an attack on his university, his rights.

He posed the rhetorical question: What is academic freedom?

"First and foremost, it is the freedom of a professor to go against the grain. To commit heresy," he said. "Any student who enters a university should be prepared for the discomfort that comes from having his or her most cherished truths questioned."

With unwavering self-assurance, Mr. Mamdani has taken aim at a lot of cherished truths lately. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Mamdani, 58, was new to America and barely known outside his narrow academic discipline, African studies.

Since then, he has willed his way into the thick of the debate over the War on Terror, casting himself as a public intellectual for the jihadist age. Last year, he published a popular book on the roots of Middle Eastern extremism. He chats with highbrow talk-show hosts like Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose. His views have been attacked by The National Review and are dismissed by some Middle East experts, but he has won praise from academic heavyweights like Noam Chomsky, the economist Jeffrey Sachs and Columbia's late Palestinian scholar Edward Said, a friend and admirer, who played a crucial role in assuring that Mr. Mamdani's book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, ended up at his own major publishing house, Pantheon Books. Admirers say the book carries on the tradition of his revered (and sometimes reviled) patron; everybody at Columbia agrees that Said's legacy is threatened. What happens next will test that ambition– and test many other things at Columbia besides.

A week before, Mr. Mamdani welcomed a visitor to his book-filled office, which is mostly decorated in red, appropriately enough for an old Marxist. He speaks softly, like many true radicals, with a lilting, cosmopolitan accent. He said he saw the controversy that now grips Columbia as part of a wider campaign against American teachers' right to express unorthodox political views.

"I find it extremely worrying," Mr. Mamdani said. He was especially incensed at Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, who recently called on professors "to resist the allure of certitude, the temptation to use the podium as an ideological platform, to indoctrinate a captive audience.

"The administration seems to be giving no indication that it understands academic freedom to be something different from freedom of speech," Mr. Mamdani said. He believes there is a crucial distinction: Teachers are supposed to teach. "I think that if we treat the classroom space as any public space, then we might as well throw out of the window the notion of the university as it developed after the Middle Ages in the West," he said. "Because all of these new trends seem to be indicating a determination to treat professors and the classroom as if they were politicians and public officials, and to ensure that they in fact reflect the prevailing public view on different issues.

"Well, then that wouldn't be a university at all. That would be a chorus."

Mr. Mamdani believes it is his part to play the dissenting outsider, and he portrays his book as an attempt to fight what he describes as America's "amnesia" about its past behavior. In a recent television interview, a somewhat perplexed Charlie Rose asked Mr. Mamdani how America should begin to respond to the challenges of the Middle East. Mr. Mamdani replied, with a Chomskian authority, "Understand yourself."

Like Said, who entitled his memoirs Out of Place, Mr. Mamdani inevitably understands himself as an outsider. He was born in Africa, but he is not black. His name is Indian, and he owns an apartment in New Delhi, but he doesn't really belong there, either. He exists, as the critic John Lahr once wrote of Mr. Mamdani's wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair, "in that weird, liminal expatriate zone." Like many such people, Mr. Mamdani ended up in New York, but his relationship with America is, as he might say, deeply problematic.

He hastens to say that he has "no illusion that any one person can step into the shoes of Edward Said," but the professor's admirers say that in effect, that is what he is trying to do.

"Mahmood fills the vacuum," said Robert Meister, a friend of Mr. Mamdani's since they met at Harvard 30 years ago, and now a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "He's claiming to be the only sincere antiterrorist."

Mr. Mamdani must be understood as coming for a very particular time and place: Africa, in the era of the Cold War. He was born in Uganda, where Indians, many of them brought over by the British to build a railroad through East Africa, made up the colonial shop-keeping class. At the country's independence from Britain, in 1962, Mr. Mamdani was offered a scholarship by the United States government. He attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he was a debater, and studied for his Ph.D. at Harvard, where he led graduate students in a strike to protest a tuition hike. He returned to Uganda, only to be kicked out by the dictator Idi Amin, who deported the Indians and confiscated their property, saying he hoped to create "black millionaires."

"I was a flaming nationalist in March 1972. And I was expelled in November 1972 as a Ugandan [Indian]," Mr. Mamdani recalled, laughing. "And I thought of Sartre saying that 'the universal intellectual is paid back in particulars.'"

Penniless, Mr. Mamdani lived as a refugee in Britain-where he went without meals and spent his days at the colonial archives, researching his dissertation-before landing a teaching job at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. At the time, the school was a center of leftist ferment. Like many, he was drawn to the thinking of Frantz Fanon, who famously wrote in his book The Wretched of the Earth that "the colonized man liberates himself in and through violence." Some students of Mr. Mamdani's would even leave school to fight in guerrilla rebellions around the continent.

Mr. Mamdani returned to Uganda after Amin's 1979 overthrow. In 1986, rebel leader Yoweri Museveni, a former Dar es Salaam student, took power. Mr. Mamdani occupies a position of prominence that an American academic could scarcely imagine. Commonly referred to simply as "The Professor," his pronouncements are front-page news, and he has debated President Museveni on television.

Eventually, though, Uganda proved too small for his ambitions. Mr. Mamdani moved to South Africa, and wrote an influential book about colonialism and apartheid, Citizen and Subject. Later, he turned his attention to the Rwandan genocide.

In 1989, he met Ms. Nair, who was researching her film Mississippi Masala, about an Indian family that moved to America after being expelled by Amin. They fell in love, married, and had a son. Though Mr. Mamdani and Ms. Nair keep a house in Uganda that overlooks Lake Victoria, they now spend much of their time in New York. Ms. Nair's success allows them to live comfortably. ("He's never been attracted by [money], and I don't think he feels he's been corrupted by it either, so there's nothing to be guilty about," Mr. Meister said.) It has also given Mr. Mamdani a degree of visibility he might not otherwise enjoy.

"Mira is a continuing inspiration," Mr. Mamdani said, particularly when it comes to the process of marketing his ideas. "I for a long time resisted the idea that any publicity was necessary. I thought that things get read or bought on their merit. I lived in that kind of world. Mira would often tell me that that's not true, that there's this entire layer of institutions … between the creative people and a potential audience."

Mr. Mamdani occasionally accompanies his wife to industry events like the Venice Film Festival, but for the most part, he said, he and his wife keep their work separate. Still, his intellectual interests-empires, exile-match themes in her work. In 2002, Ms. Nair made a short film about a Pakistani immigrant killed in the World Trade Center as part of a project called 11'09''01, in order to counter the stereotype, she told The New Yorker, "that Muslims equal terrorists."

"Both of us, over the last six years, have spent most of our time living in the U.S., but with a split sense of home," Mr. Mamdani said. "We look at the U.S. through a perspective forged in many places, and through a sensibility that very consciously takes into account multiple experiences, and maybe is never quite at home in any one of those places. So we both share some kind of a restlessness, some kind of a discontent which is productive in a creative sense."

In 1999, Mr. Mamdani took a job in Columbia's anthropology department, and he and Ms. Nair moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive. One of their neighbors, as it turned out, was Edward Said. Mr. Mamdani became friends with Said, with whom he shared an obsession with the legacy of colonialism. After Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Mamdani became a ubiquitous presence at antiwar rallies and teach-ins. "He just had an extremely good analysis, and it was right-on from the beginning," said Brenda Coughlin, a sociology graduate student who helped Mr. Mamdani research his book.

Mr. Mamdani had to be talked into putting aside the plaudits of academia to write Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, fearing that it might dim his reputation among his academic peers. Before he died of leukemia in 2003, Said read the manuscript, and made sure it made it into the hands of his own editor, Shelley Wanger.

"Edward had a loving, proprietary attitude toward those who he thought should be guided in this difficult world," Mr. Mamdani said. "He guided me to an appropriate publisher."

Helped along by a television appearance, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim sold through its first printing in days. It is now in its sixth hardcover printing, and will soon be released in paperback. Mr. Mamdani, who has a dry wit, likes to joke that the book's sold well because Americans misunderstand the title, thinking it "a directory of good Muslims and bad Muslims-you know, which ones to avoid."

He conceived of his book as a rejoinder to the popular notion of a "clash of civilizations" between the Islamic world and the West, a view associated with intellectuals like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. In Mr. Mamdani's view, these commentators-and the Bush administration-divided Islam into groups of "good" Muslims, who were secular and pro-American, and "bad" Muslims, who were devout and inclined to terrorism. Mr. Mamdani believes that religion has nothing to do with it. "I know of no one inspired by Osama bin Laden for religious reasons," Mr. Mamdani writes in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. "Bin Laden is a politician, not a theologian."

It follows for him that political Islam-or at least Al Qaeda's toxic brand of it-is not an outgrowth of the faith, but a "mutation," one largely created by the United States in the course of contracting out brutal Cold War rebel movements in Angola and Mozambique in the 1970's, a policy that he says culminated in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union.

"Official America learned to distinguish between two types of terrorism-'theirs' and 'ours'-and cultivated an increasingly benign attitude to ours," he writes. "But then it turned out that their terrorism was born of ours."

Some terrorism experts question his version of history. "It's sort of conventional Upper West Side [thinking], to just to blame everything on the U.S. I think it's kind of lazy," said Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. "The real story is that the C.I.A. did not have a clue about who bin Laden was until 1995."

In 2001, David Rieff wrote a devastating review in The New Republic of Mr. Mamdani's book on Rwanda, alleging that, in his attempt to explain the historical roots of the antipathy that drove hundreds of thousands of Hutus to hack their Tutsi neighbors to death with machetes, Mr. Mamdani was "on a certain level … inviting his readers to feel the historical pain of the génocidaires."

Like his youthful idol Frantz Fanon, Mr. Mamdani is fascinated by the political uses of violence and, also like Fanon, sometimes finds himself treading the line between analysis and apologia.

In an interview last year conducted by Nermeen Shaikh for the online publication AsiaSource.org, Mr. Mamdani was asked about the motives of the contemporary terrorist. He quoted a verse of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and speculated that suicide bombers see themselves as participants in a "youth revolt."

Mr. Mamdani told The Observer, "So many find it tempting to draw that line between good and evil, where we can be very comfortable on this side of the line called 'good' and just have our adversaries as 'evil.'"

"He is not a defender of the people who brought down the Twin Towers," said his friend Robert Meister. "What he is trying to say is that [American foreign-policy makers] are being hypocritical and are not really antiterrorist in the way that he is, because they are not democrats, with a small 'd,' in the way that he is."

Back at the public forum, a middle-aged man in a herringbone blazer raised his hand. "It seems to me, that the substantial issue is the issue of anti-Semitism," he said. "Where is that debate going to take place?"

Mr. Mamdani jumped in.

"The notion," he said, "that any critique of the state of Israel is anti-Semitism is a nonstarter."

Later, talking to a reporter, he expanded on this theme.

"Bollinger is all the time talking of a measured intellectual temperament, which takes everything into account, which sees all sides of an issue, which is balance itself," he said. "But what about the intellectual predisposition of an inventor, of someone who makes a new discovery, of the tenacity that is required to go in the face of societal common sense and intellectual orthodoxy? Intellectual work requires you to persist in the face of no reward, and continuous critique. Even in the face of people thinking you're nuts, or even crossing the line to the enemy side, to lunacy.

"Does this temperament have a place in the university? Of course it does," he continued. "And that is what academic freedom is supposed to protect."

Though Becky Sharp's anti heroine in Thackeray's self-professed novel without a hero is one of the most familiar figures in world literature, she has remained an elusive quarry on-screen. Becky's last incarnation in a Hollywood movie was Miriam Hopkins' sassy yet distractingly mannered portrait in Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp (1935), Hollywood's first full-length Technicolor (three-color) feature film. That was almost 70 years ago. I never saw a 1932 version of Vanity Fair with a pre-stellar Myrna Loy as Becky Sharp. Nor have I seen a 1923 silent-film version, though I did see a tantalizing clip of the legendary Minnie Madden Fiske playing Becky Sharp at a lecture given in the 60's by Lee Strasberg, who spoke glowingly of Mrs. Fiske's surpassing subtlety as an actress.

Subtlety, unfortunately, is in short supply in Ms. Nair's frequently lavish spectacle. The usually spicier Reese Witherspoon has been saddled by Ms. Nair and her screenwriters with a sweet and sentimentalized Becky who's much less astringent than either Thackeray's character or Ms. Witherspoon's own more satisfyingly satirical approximation of Becky as the ambitious Tracy Flick in Alexander Payne's Election (1999).

Still, I can't criticize Ms. Nair and her collaborators too harshly for their choices-rendering a Victorian classic into an opening-week attraction for an infantile mass audience with little stomach for adult social criticism. This is to say that Ms. Nair and her associates had fewer opportunities to have fun with their characters than Thackeray did from inside the horse's mouth. He fully understood, as does Ms. Nair, that there's always something comically obscene about the surging pretentiousness of the nouveau riche in all ages, including our own ( vide the recent tech-stock bubble). In Thackeray's ever-scheming, ever-calculating cosmos, Becky Sharp doesn't function on a higher moral plane than that of her unyielding social adversaries; on occasion, she can be as cruel and snobbish as the worst of them. Hence, I can't imagine a commercially viable movie that could be remotely "faithful" to Thackeray's expansive critique of the Victorian Gilded Age.

How much beside the point, therefore, is the following comment related to The New York Times ' Caryn James (in the Aug. 29, 2004, issue) by the film's major screenwriter, Julian Fellowes: "She was born to no future and decided to change her fate. This business of thinking, 'I'm going to deal myself a better hand'-you can't write that for a 21st-century audience and make it sympathetic."

You can if you choose to leave in all of Becky's unpleasant actions in the book, and also refer to her by her more formal first name of Rebecca, as often as Thackeray does. Instead, Ms. Nair and Mr. Fellowes have tacked on a waif-like childhood prologue for Becky in which, as the daughter of her impecunious painter father, Francis Sharp (Roger Lloyd Pack), she haggles winningly with the romantically presented Gabriel Byrne, the Marquess of Steyne, over the price of one of her father's paintings.

When we next encounter Becky, we see her leaving Miss Pinkerton's Academy at Chiswick, where she's been employed to teach French to well-born young ladies; the most pertinent one for our purposes is Miss Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai). The young lady's family coach has been dispatched to fetch Amelia and her temporary house guest, Becky Sharp, to the Sedley home. Thackeray had a great deal of fun with Amelia, who is always so overwrought that she can hardly bear to leave all her school friends behind. The Amelia of Ms. Nair and Mr. Fellowes is just, well, nice and sincere. This makes Becky look extra spunky as she brazenly tosses out of the coach window a parting gift from the school-Dr. Johnson's Dictionary -that lands at the feet of Miss Pinkerton (Ruth Sheen) herself, much to Amelia's consternation. In these scenes, the movie is unusually faithful to the book.

But with Becky's arrival at the Sedley manse, we are thrust into a Masterpiece Theatre of suitors, snobs, bores, eccentrics and gargoyles of all ages and both sexes. Rival claimants for Amelia's hand emerge very quickly in the persons of two military officers about to go off to the historic Battle of Waterloo. After the Society Ball in Brussels, the self-adoringly lecherous George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) marries Amelia less out of love than out of a desire to spite his rich merchant father-Mr. Osborne the elder (Jim Broadbent) wanted George to marry someone much wealthier than Amelia. Meanwhile, the infinitely more honorable William Dobbin (Rhys Ifans) suffers interminably from his unrequited passion for Amelia. William finally goes on a spiritual pilgrimage to India to forget Amelia after she continues to spurn him even after her husband has died on the Waterloo battlefield, but his suffering becomes so outlandishly palpable that it evoked laughter in the screening room.

For her part, Becky Sharp never fails to seize any opportunity for advancement. After insinuating herself into a more dominant role in the affairs of the household and her coarse employer, Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins), Becky's eye falls on Sir Pitt's younger son, Rawdon Crawley (James Purefoy), a swashbuckling dragoon with a costly gambling habit, whom she easily seduces into marriage. All this after Rawdon's aunt, Sir Pitt's humorously sharp-witted sister, Miss Matilda Crawden (Eileen Atkins), has befriended the quick-witted Becky and taken her to London as a companion. But when Matilda realizes that Becky has snatched her beloved nephew from right under her nose, she disowns Rawdon and expels Becky from her house.

When Becky finds herself in financial difficulties because of Rawdon's gambling losses as well as his other profligate behavior, she turns for assistance to the susceptible Marquess of Steyne, who pays off her debts and offers her an entrée to the Very High Society that has steadfastly-almost religiously-rejected her because of her low birth. Of course, Steyne demands sexual favors in return, and though Becky resists his advances to retain her marital honor, Rawdon catches her in a compromising position. After thrashing the marquess, Rawdon gives his wife a tongue-lashing before leaving her forever.

There are, in Thackeray's novel, enough hootchy-kootchy elements to justify Ms. Nair's Kama Sutra –like extravaganzas. But in an 820-page novel, there's also enough time to establish all the psychosocial coordinates for the sexual intrigues, whereas in a two-and-a-half-hour movie, the plot has to be thinned out and speeded up-enough, at least, for the filmmakers to create some semblance of narrative cohesion for the ending.

In both the book and the film, Becky is given the decisive task of putting Amelia out of her self-imposed misery by enshrining the memory of her late, worthless husband, George Osborne, at the expense of William Dobbin, the man who truly loves her despite all her ill-advised rebuffs. When Becky shows Amelia a lust-filled letter she received from George on the night before his death at Waterloo, Amelia is finally liberated from her not-so-magnificent obsession with George and rushes into Dobbin's sheltering arms.

Though Ms. Nair's Becky is still shunned by many of the more respectable families in Britain, she is redeemed and rewarded after a fashion with a luxurious voyage to India, where she is seen triumphantly perched on an elephant-an experience she only dreamed of in the book. Still, one can forgive Ms. Nair for exploiting what was a dream in her literary source for a heartwarming image of the movie heroine's life in the ascendant.

Margaret Mitchell denied all her life that Scarlett O'Hara was based on Becky Sharp, and Melanie Hamilton on Amelia Osborne. Yet there's a tantalizing scene in Gone with the Wind in which a jealous Scarlett overhears with some puzzlement Melanie telling Ashley Wilkes that Mr. Dickens is more of a gentleman with women than Mr. Thackeray. And for Thackeray's Waterloo, there is Mitchell's Gettysburg. Obviously, Scarlett has come over much better on-screen, in her transcendent green-eyed incarnation by the ineffable Vivien Leigh, than Becky Sharp. Perhaps this may be accounted for by the differences between Mitchell's romantic popular fiction and Thackeray's more ironic and more skeptical literature-as far as the ever-hopeful moviegoing masses go, one always trumps the other.

Garden-Variety Malaise

Zach Braff's Garden State , from his own screenplay, seems already to have struck a nerve among young moviegoers with histories of parentally and psychiatrically imposed mood-and-mind-altering anti-depressant drugs. As it happens, the movie's protagonist, Andrew Largeman, played by Mr. Braff (also the writer, director and presumably total auteur of Garden State ), has the fictional misfortune of having his own father, Gideon Largeman (played by Ian Holm), serve as his psychiatrist. As we learn near the end of the movie, a childhood act of impulsive aggression leads to a very serious accident that deprived 9-year-old Andrew of a normal childhood and has becalmed him, in adulthood, in a state of virtual catatonia. But before this fateful piece of information is supplied, Andrew's remarkable and often grotesquely quiescent reactions to the most outrageous provocations seem designed merely for the amusement of the audience. The aftereffect is often one of bewilderment: What's the problem?

After nine years of pursuing a marginal acting career in Los Angeles, Andrew is summoned back to New Jersey by his distraught father, Gideon, who tells him via cell phone that Andrew's mother has drowned in her bathtub. Again, Andrew's total nonreaction to the news is more strange than funny. I must confess, at this point, I feared the worst in the way of a feature-length zombie movie full of drugs and hallucinatory visions, so prevalent in today's youth-going-to-hell movies.

But very quickly I was reassured by the remarkably persistent gentleness and sweetness of the proceedings, particularly when Andrew encounters Sam (Natalie Portman) at the local clinic, launching a magical romance between two wounded and vulnerable young people without an ounce of self-pity between them. Andrew is also reunited with many of his high-school friends, almost all of whom have gotten nowhere in their lives. In this respect, Garden State makes Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991) look like a cavalcade of success stories. Yet even when the coke and grass are trotted out, and Andrew's perceptions become accelerated in an otherwise harmless game of post office that ends up more kiss-kiss than bang-bang, the participants in the drug-dazed revels never cross over into outright lewdness. After all, these people have to keep living with each other, however young they are.

Andrew arrives late at the funeral and feels guilty when he realizes he cannot shed a tear over his mother's demise. Shades of Hamlet and Yorick: Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), Zach's high-school buddy, pops up as the gravedigger at his mother's funeral and helps ease Zach's way into his old circles.

The happy ending is somewhat conventional in comparison to all the unusual experiences that have preceded it. Still, there's no way any viewer could fail to be depressed if Andrew and Sam didn't make it as a for-keeps couple. Mr. Braff, Ms. Portman, Mr. Sarsgaard and Mr. Holm never strike a false note as a remarkably coherent acting ensemble, and it is good to see Ron Leibman again in the small role of Doctor Cohen, a perceptively whimsical neurologist who is unfazed by Andrew's unnatural nonchalance.

Korea's Korean War

Kang Je-gyu's Tae Guk Gi (The Brotherhood of War) , from his own screenplay, is reportedly the highest-grossing film of all time in South Korea, even exceeding the local take from Titanic -and one can see why, since much of its 140-minute running time is devoted to the most harrowing footage I have ever seen: hand-to-hand and throat-to-throat combat between rival hordes of Korean soldiers, North and South, Communist and anti-Communist, in the so-called forgotten war that raged on the Korean Peninsula between 1950 and 1953.

The war may have been forgotten here in America, but apparently not in North and South Korea, where its fratricidal wounds have still not healed. Republicans back then derided it as "Truman's war" and blamed him for not unleashing Gen. Douglas MacArthur on the Red Chinese. The Chinese intervened late in the action to bloody the nose of our up-to-then victorious armies, both American and South Korean. Truman decided then, as did John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, that the risk of World War III outweighed the anguished yelps of Republican hawks. Thank God George W. Bush was not the President on either occasion.

I have seen several interesting films on the Korean War, among them Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet (1951) and Anthony Mann's Men in War (1957), but in neither of them was the South Korean Army significantly involved. Tae Guk Gi returns the compliment by virtually ignoring the American armed forces, except for some jet fighters strafing the North Koreans and the Chinese on behalf of the South Koreans.

The story centers on two brothers, Jang Dong-gun (Lee Jin-tae) and Lin Jin-seok (Won Bin), who are dragged into the South Korean Army against their wishes when the North invades the South. This sibling saga, full of noble sacrifices and melodramatic misunderstandings, seems increasingly incongruous in a brutal war fueled by rival ideologies only dimly understood by the combatants on both sides. This is not a "patriotic" film in the normal sense of the word, but a somewhat cynical view of one people long persecuted by their neighbors becoming bitterly divided by the global conflicts between outside powers beyond their control, leaving them compelled to kill each other in the process. The film is thus worth seeing for its sheer otherness at a time when Americans are forced to look increasingly at the outside world for new information.

Miriam Hopkins splashed her way recklessly through the role in the 1935 version, Becky Sharp , the first complete feature-length film ever processed in the revolutionary new three-strip Technicolor. Reams of copy were filed about director Rouben Mamoulian's tints and hues, while the movie itself was roundly snubbed as episodic, jerky and disappointing. Nothing much has changed. Indian director Mira Nair ( Monsoon Wedding ) has made a cinematically impressive, beautifully photographed but dramatically tedious epic in which Thackeray's skewered satire of British social pariahs veers dangerously in the direction of burlesque. So overpopulated is its canvas, so vast is its reach, that the plot becomes almost meaningless. From a London orphanage in 1802, through Brussels in the Napoleonic wars, to the final shot of the delectable Ms. Witherspoon riding through India on an elephant with yet another in her endless stream of lovers, director Nair follows the busy style of the low-budget Monsoon Wedding . Clearly, there's a lot going on. But when the ratio was smaller, the style seemed more fluid. The narrative here is just sleepwalking. It's static and earthbound-a dull procession of long shots, medium shots and close-ups, shrilly punctured by a dull cacophony of babbling dialogue that only occasionally rings true. It's lavish but lulling, and at two hours and 18 minutes, it's something of a bore.

Headstrong and willful, determined to equal men at the risk of being judged a bit of a slut, Becky may have been an early feminist, but she has always emerged as a great deal less than lovable. Miriam Hopkins knew how to play strident, irritating and powerfully seductive at the same time; the endearing Ms. Witherspoon just looks badly dressed and uncomfortable. Her purity and sweetness are wasted in red curly wigs, and no way was her petite décolletage designed to stretch itself torturously into the kind of Empire waistlines favored by Madame DuBarry. Fueled by ambition, she turns social climbing into a cottage industry, dancing the minuet through the servants' quarters to a titled position in the aristocracy, decimating friends, foes, fiancés, simpering fops, snobby soldiers, poor noblemen, rich bourgeois lechers and even her loving husband and children. Alas, as the people in her life all meet with one misfortune after another, Becky survives, benefits and rises to a happy ending with the flick of her nosegay. Or at least Ms. Witherspoon does. Cursed, snubbed, patronized, cruelly rejected, she is more self-serving than self-sacrificing, but in this movie she is always forgivable. Even when she destroys her warm, devoted and faithful husband, Rawdon Crawley (an excellent performance by James Purefoy)-the only man in her queue of conquests who has loved her unconditionally-feminist director Nair makes sure her feminist star shines through her tears with the radiant can-do Elle Woods charm her fans expect. Thus, what emerges is a Becky who suffers from no condition more psychologically daunting than beauty without breeding. When he created this scheming little tramp in 1848, I seriously doubt if William Makepeace Thackeray ever envisioned Becky Sharp as Lorelei Lee.

Still, there is much to admire here. From the Dickensian horrors of the orphanage to the chandeliers and candelabras of Belgian ballrooms to the casinos of Baden-Baden, the locations are a treat, even if there are far too many of them. If there is nothing as memorable as the scene in the 1935 film where Rouben Mamoulian shattered the fancy-dress ball in Brussels with the explosion of Napoleon's cannons outside, at least we are spared the Battle of Waterloo. Too bad we were not also spared the pointless, idiotic musical number extraneously inserted by Mira Nair as homage to her Asian roots, with poor Ms. Witherspoon forced to do a clumsy and embarrassing belly dance like Madonna in Bollywood. But randy appearances by Eileen Atkins, Jim Broadbent, Bob Hoskins, Rhys Ifans, Geraldine McEwan and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers add flavor to a bland broth, and Ms. Witherspoon carries her own weight throughout. Vanity Fair is O.K. fodder for Masterpiece Theatre mavens, but as golddiggers go, I prefer Scarlett O'Hara, Forever Amber and Betty Grable.

Hustlers in Hollywood

Best of all the new films is Criminal , a breathless and dazzling caper that knocks your socks off, based on the Argentine hit Nine Queens . Chronicling 24 hours in the lives of two small-potato Hollywood scam artists, it provides both the terrific, cheddar-faced John C. Reilly (who stopped the show in Chicago singing "Mister Cellophane") and the kinetic young Mexican actor Diego Luna ( Y Tu Mamá También ) with their first above-title starring roles in a mainstream feature. They've been practicing.

At 9:30 a.m., Mr. Luna-a scruffy kid with street charm-gets arrested for pulling the old "change for $100" scam on a casino waitress. But Mr. Reilly, the arresting officer from the LAPD vice squad who drags him away in handcuffs, is an even bigger crook who is looking for a new partner. In what follows, you get a tutorial in the psychology of the ultimate hustle, and get to know two likable, nonviolent crooks who are as innocent and gullible as their victims. "This is not some summer job," warns the old con, and the young rookie becomes his devoted pupil. When the opportunity of a lifetime falls into their laps in the form of a no-fail six-figure score involving a priceless 1878 U.S. Treasury bill, they land in lucky honey-until they start distrusting each other and fall into the clutches of the rest of L.A.'s criminal underground. Proving the lie to the theory that you can't con a con, everyone cheats and betrays everyone else, there's a wild plot twist every hour of the day, and nobody is who or what they seem. Between traps and ambushes, Mr. Reilly picks up his dry cleaning, argues with his duplicitous sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who runs a four-star hotel, and enforces his own ethics and rules (No guns! No soft drinks in his $60,000 automobile!) with unintended hilarity. As each aspect of their cleverness collapses, the sage and the apprentice sink deeper into their own quicksand until the final fraud, which is fresh, inspired, totally unexpected and shocking enough to spit-curl a buck private's crew cut.

Criminal is a power-driven vehicle that perfectly balances Mr. Reilly's cool, laid-back cruise control with Mr. Luna's youthful intensity and feral, unjaded energy. The film has been carefully directed and solidly written by Steven Soderbergh's longtime assistant director, Gregory Jacobs (making his directing debut, with a co-writing credit for one "Sam Lowry," a pseudonym for Mr. Soderbergh himself). Unlike most Soderbergh films, this one actually makes sense. After collaborating on such garbage spills as Solaris and Full Frontal , they completed this neat little winner on a low budget and a 30-day shooting schedule, focusing on narrative coherence and character development instead of just showing off. The payoff is a mind-tripping knockout.

Thrill Me? Kill Me!

Wicker Park is a shapeless mess in which toy boy Josh Hartnett makes another fatal attempt to prove he can compete with real actors in some show-biz arena more serious than the covers of teenage fan magazines. This alleged thriller is so distanced from any genuine thrill that I am not sure I can even do its head-scratching plot justice. Mr. Hartnett, who looks like the star of a high-school track meet, plays Matt, a New York photographer who, for some unexplained reason, has ended up in Chicago working for his girlfriend's brother in a high-tech advertising agency. He has never sold anything more valuable than a stick of gum, but suddenly he has been chosen to fly to China to sign up a world-shaking company for reasons that are never explained. He hates flying. He also hates his job, but love is everything. Or is it? Suddenly he's in the men's room of a restaurant, where he overhears the voice of an old girlfriend named Lisa (Diane Kruger) who broke his heart and disappeared from his life two years ago, for reasons that are never explained. He misses his flight to Shanghai and stalks her to a room at the Drake Hotel where she is checked in for one night, for reasons that are never explained. He falls asleep in her bed and steals her compact. Cut to a flashback. Matt and Lisa meet in a shoe store owned by his wimpy best friend, Luke (Matthew Lillard). They walk through a Chicago snowstorm talking about tropical fish. (Would I make up these things?) Their favorite meeting place is in a neighborhood called Wicker Park, next to a chili-dog stand. Every time they go there, it is always snowing. They never buy a chili dog.

Cut to the present. Matt drives all over Chicago looking for Lisa, and no matter where he ends up, he always finds an empty parking space. He also finds a key and breaks into her apartment. Lisa comes home but it's not the Lisa he once knew, not the Lisa he's been stalking. This Lisa has the same name, same perfume, but she's been stalking him! She's really an actress named Alex, who's been dating the likable but hopelessly unlucky-at-love Luke. Meanwhile, between trips to O'Hare to upgrade his ticket to Shanghai for flights he always misses, Matt has no home, for reasons that are never explained, so he sleeps with Lisa No. 2, who pretends to be a hospital nurse, for reasons that are never explained. She is also a friend of the real Lisa, who apparently lives across the alley and is always crawling into her window through the fire escape for reasons … must I go on? Since nobody knows where anyone is, everyone keeps leaving messages on cell phones (except the people from Matt's office, who never think to call China, or the executives in China, who never think to call Chicago). It starts snowing. Everyone is forced to suffer through a nonsensical avant-garde play starring Lisa No. 2 that Charles Ludlam would have used for toilet paper. Have you had enough? It all ends up on the floor of a crowded terminal at O'Hare, where Lisa No. 1 misses her flight to London to join a touring company of Cabaret , for reasons that are never … hell, you get the picture. I wish I did. Why doesn't Matt just go home? Where has Lisa No. 1 been all this time? What does Lisa No. 2 want with Lisa No. 1? Why is Josh Hartnett afraid to take his clothes off in bed? Are they all psychos? Nothing whatsoever makes the slightest bit of sense in Wicker Park . L'Appartement , the French thriller from which it has been stolen-er, adapted-had a murder mystery as its centerpiece. This truncated version, ineptly directed by Paul McGuigan (who made the medieval religious-hysteria bomb The Reckoning ) and confusingly written by Brandon Boyce (who penned the infinitely superior Apt Pupil ), has no murder, although it is murder to sit through. There's not much of a mystery, either, except the puzzle of why anybody wanted to make it in the first place. The acting is uniformly vapid. The brunette Lisa is Australia's Rose Byrne, who played the oversexed Briseis opposite Brad Pitt's Playgirl centerfold in Troy . The blond Lisa is Germany's Diane Kruger, who appeared in the same epic as Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships, but who, in Wicker Park , just looks like she'd like to hop the next freighter out of town. Neither of them are as pretty as Josh Hartnett, who appears only slightly less unintentionally funny than he did as a miscast hip-hop Iago in O , or as a pilot who looked 14 years old in Pearl Harbor. But if this dud proves that thrillers don't always thrill, Mr. Hartnett proves that camera-ready hunks who need acting lessons aren't always ready for the camera.