Starring: Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson
Director: Chris Noonan
Category: I
At the end of Miss Potter - a film about British writer-illustrator Beatrix Potter, who created characters such as Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck - director Chris Noonan inserts a title card saying that Potter left 1,600 hectares of land to the National Trust on her death to preserve it from development. But it's Britain's tourist industry that stands to benefit most from Miss Potter. Awash with scenes of Victorian upper-class households and pastoral Cumbrian heartlands, it reinforces stereotypes about the country: a haven of bucolic elegance, with a tradition of tea parties in townhouses and rustic splendour on the farms.
There's nothing inherently wrong with such a sentimental portrayal - and Miss Potter does it well, with London and the Lake District coming across as graceful and radiant. But just as this is hardly a true representation of the country even back then, Noonan's depiction of Potter is somewhat awry. Renee Zellweger's Potter oozes whimsy at every turn, sometimes referring to her creations as 'my friends' and talking to them (Noonan has them move on paper in response). Her depiction of an artist in love - opposite an uncomfortable performance by Ewan McGregor, as her publisher-turned-admirer Norman Warne - reduces Potter to a bumbling, naive figure.
In fairness, Miss Potter is more than a biopic, since it focuses on the period in which Potter is in love with Warne, and then a final coda where she moves to Hill Top Farm in Cumbria and stands at the cusp of her courtship (and eventual marriage) to William Heelis (Lloyd Owen). By portraying Potter and Warne - and Norman's sister, the equally eccentric Amelia (Emily Watson) - as people trying to transgress the stifling conventions of a class-driven, conservative society, Miss Potter undermines itself by resembling a museum piece that trades in a wide-eyed, ironic eccentricity that's often mistaken as Britishness personified.