Watching this horrifically twee film is like having your face pushed into a bowl of pot-pourri for 90 minutes in a two-star B&B somewhere in Cumbria.
Miss Potter (2006)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:120
Fresh:79
Rotten:41
Average Rating:6.2/10
Consensus: A charming biopic with that maintains its sweetness even in sadder moments.
Theatrical Release:05-01-2007
Synopsis: Beatrix Potter has delighted generations of children with her books. But she kept her own private life locked carefully away. Oscar-winning star Renee Zellweger is now bringing her secret story to... Beatrix Potter has delighted generations of children with her books. But she kept her own private life locked carefully away. Oscar-winning star Renee Zellweger is now bringing her secret story to the screen in "Miss Potter," the first film directed by Chris Noonan since his charming 1995 movie, Babe. It is set in the high summer days of late Victorian and Edwardian England, during which Beatrix develops her natural skills as artist and story-teller. When she finally publishes her debut book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, she becomes a writing celebrity. It also leads to courtship and her first love with publisher Norman Warne, played by Ewan McGregor. Their relationship and his marriage proposal in July, 1905, was to change Beatrix's life for ever. It was a love which she could not announce - or even talk about. In high-society London, her parents had insisted she keep it from friends and neighbours. They considered her proposed wedding a mismatch. Warne, they said, was from ‘trade' and demanded that she carefully reconsider their life together. Beatrix allowed herself to be persuaded to leave her fiancé and London. It was supposed to be a time for reflection and calm. But, instead, she faced tragedy and loneliness and returned, with a different outlook. She became a woman of strong views and independence. She also built up a farming dynasty in the Lake District - a dynasty over which she took charge long after her writing career virtually ended in 1913. It established her as a woman ahead of her time. Despite becoming the world's most successful children's writer and a wealthy landowner and prize-winning farmer, she never forgot her first love. -- © Weinstein Co. [More]
Starring: Renée Zellweger, Emily Watson, Ewan McGregor, Lloyd Owen
Starring: Renée Zellweger, Emily Watson, Ewan McGregor, Lloyd Owen
Director: Chris Noonan
Director: Chris Noonan
Producer: Mike Medavoy, David Thwaites, Arnold Messer, Corey Sienega
Composer: Nigel Westlake
Studio: Weinstein Company
Reviews for Miss Potter
Pitched awkwardly -- neither for children nor cool young adults -- it’s very sweet, very nice and just the thing for a girlie matinée with mum and nan.
This is an odd film in many ways, but the romantic scenes work brilliantly, thanks to McGregor's genuinely charming performance.
It's worthy and beautifully produced, but it feels like a fantasy rather than the truth.
The film is a guaranteed tearjerker, but more than that, an uplifting tribute to a single woman's quest for independence that would surely make Bridget Jones blush.
Its old-fashioned sincerity ultimately proves disarming. Sweet but not cloying, it’s a heartening portrait of goodness surmounting the odds.
Renee Zellweger's pretentious and unconvincing portrayal of Beatrix Potter doesn't help much to endear the viewer to the artist.
Beautiful, gentile, and oh-so-quaint, but utterly pointless and terminally boring. Zellweger's performance is both strange and misguided.
Missing that childlike love for nature and animals that Beatrix must have had, and in turn, forgets what it's like to have an imagination.
Feels more lightweight than it should and simultaneously not magical enough.
The film offers scant insight into the forces that inspired Potter's phenomenally successful career.
You keep waiting for another Beatrix to break out, to match the giddy passion shown by her bunnies or Amelia, but she does not.
Unbearably, the script accommodates a quaking courtship between the slightly dotty Potter and her devoted young publisher, ho exchange romantic byplay such as, "You and rabbits -- extraordinary!" and "I recently remembered a story…about a duck!"
If the movie is respectful and factually informative, it's also tightly corseted -- in dramatic terms.
Blackness may have lurked within the Potter heart, but you’d never know it from Miss Potter, which shifts the burden of ill humor onto the authoress’s petit-bourgeois mother.
Even the extremely simple 'Peter Rabbit' has more going on than this.
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