Miss Potter

This film about Beatrix Potter will cap my winter film series at the Clark, on literature and landscape in pastoral Britain. When I found that one of the Thomas Hardy films I was considering (Far from the Madding Crowd) was currently unavailable on DVD, I needed to come up with something new and this release from the very end of 2006 seemed a candidate. Unfortunately it had been at the top of my Netflix queue for months, with the unvarying report, “very long wait.” It was also unavailable at any local video store. (I suspect some nefarious Harvey Weinstein scheme -- same with Factory Girl.) So I had to catch it on pay-per-view, which I had never used and never will again, the widescreen film being shown in the abominably misnamed “full screen” format. Nonetheless I wanted to like the film, and I did. Director Chris Noonan (of Babe fame) re-pairs Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor from the retro ’50s romantic comedy Down With Love, this time as the bestselling children’s author and her publisher-suitor in the late Victorian era. Emily Watson is his sister and her best friend. Why did such a film receive a lukewarm critical response and indifferent distribution? I found it delightful from start to finish, when in the end Beatrix surmounts tragedy by using the money from her Peter Rabbit books to acquire and preserve large plots of the Lake District, an especially telling link between literature and landscape in a series that begins with a film about Wordsworth and Coleridge (i.e. Pandaemonium, followed by Sense and Sensibility and Tess.) So anyway, I look forward to seeing Miss Potter again in true widescreen, and to seeing whether my audience responds as favorably as I. (2006, PPV, n.) *8-* (MC-57.)