>>REVIEW
MISS POTTER
STARRING Rene Zellweger and Ewan McGregor
DIRECTED BY Chris Noonan
Opens Friday, January 19
Check listings
I know nothing of beloved children’s author Beatrix Potter. However, my enjoyment was only heightened by my ignorance while viewing the new biopic Miss Potter and I was obliged to take this movie entirely at face value.
In director Chris Noonan’s envisioning, Rene Zellweger is Miss Potter, a compassionate and innocently eccentric woman living with her well-to-do parents in London. Since childhood, while her parents busied themselves in the business of high society, Potter spent much of her time locked away in her room with her dear friends – a collection of hand-drawn animal characters of her creation and whose stories she has nurtured into a symbiotic relationship over the years.
But Potter is a little girl no longer, she is a grown woman and her parents are none too eager to have her married off to any eligible bachelor of acceptable inheritance. A prospect that simply won’t do for the independent-minded Potter who is far too preoccupied with finding someone to publish her stories to concern herself with the trivialities of love and marriage. Until she finds both in Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), a rookie publisher with a strong affinity for both Potter and her creations. The two trip into love and a rather coy marriage proposal soon follows, but Warne, a tradesman, is a little too low in the pecking order of English society – a point duly noted by Potter’s parents.
This film is charming and cute, with Zellweger and McGregor delivering the chemistry they first ignited in Down With Love. But what I found most alluring was the complete absence of any prescribed conflict. With the exception of a short dark turn in the late second act, the story drifts amiably and humbly along, like the sleepy bedtime tales it invokes. |
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