Dir.
Chris Noonan, UK/US, 2006, 92 mins
Cast: Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson, Barbara
Flynn, Bill Paterson
Review by Matthew Rodgers
Peter Rabbit, Jeremy Fisher, and Jemima
Puddleduck are just a few of the names that have kept a generation
of children entertained with their tales of moralistic adventures
in the English countryside but It is the origins of those
characters and the imagination from which they manifested
that is the focus of the film, Beatrix Potter. But is hers
a story worth telling?
Set in 1902 we find Miss Potter (Renee Zelwegger) living
at home with her overbearing parents who are desperate to
continue climbing the social ladder. In order to find her
own path in life she retreats to her own fantasy world of
mice driven carriages and inquisitive rabbits from which
emerged those famous stories that changed her life.
Beatrix Potter is something of an oddity because the storyteller’s
life just isn’t that interesting. Any dilemmas that
she is confronted with are common occurrences in day to day
life resulting in a fairly uneventful pace to the film, it
has the feel of a BBC dramatisation (not surprising as it
was funded by them) that wouldn’t be out of place on
the gogglebox. The only really interesting aspect of the
script, that is never fully explored, intentionally or not,
arises from the cleverly integrated animated characters that
come to life from the page, hinting at a loss of marbles
for the young Miss Potter, but maybe that was just me?
Where the film does replicate the
magic from the books is in the performances of the lead
actors. Renee Zelwegger is superb as the puffy faced author
whose initial naivety hides a driving burn for independence
in her suffocated life. But even her Oscar winning prowess
is no match for (and probably complemented by) Ewan McGregor’s love interest, Norman
Warne. Their chemistry is obvious and possibly still smouldering
from 2003’s Down With Love as he plays against his
usual cocksure type to deliver a film stealing performance
of nervous likeability. The rest of the supporting cast are
also extremely competent with special mention going to Emily
Watson as the feisty Millie.
Miss Potter isn’t your usual
biopic of trauma and tragedy on a grand scale. Instead
it is an intimate soft focus portrayal of an impossibly
sweet central character that will make ideal viewing on
a rainy Sunday afternoon leaving you with that warm glow
that only a good movie can.
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