Ray Pride

When you do what I do, sweet, modest surprises at the movies are few, as is a movie as unexpectedly delightful as "Miss Potter."

In some ways, the story of illustrator and author Beatrix Potter (Renée Zellweger) is about a woman ahead of her time, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century woman from upper-class privilege who becomes not just a published writer, but also a phenomenon. (And later in life, until her 1943 death, she turned her substantial fortune drawn from Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and Jemima Puddleduck to acquiring a massive expanse of England's Lake District, which she bequeathed to the National Trust.) But, as directed by Chris Noonan (whose only other feature is 1995's "Babe") from a script by Richard Maltby (Broadway's "Fosse," "Ain't Misbehavin'"), it's also a delicate, literate, likeable exploration of the manners of another time, and about what it's like to become a published author. Zellweger plays Potter with her customary charm and fluster, working quietly and well against Ewan McGregor, playing Norman Warne, her equally sheltered publisher and, as her parents, the gleefully appalling Barbara Flynn and a mutton-chopped Bill Paterson. Phyllida Law gleams as Warne's invalid mother in a brief scene, and Emily Watson, as his sister, Millie, embodies a bold, man-dressed, fin de siècle Annie Hall.

Despite its convincing London setting, Noonan tells me, "The interiors [were] all shot in tin sheds in the middle of a sodden field in the Isle of Man." The government of that small entity has made investments in a number of movies, "But why the Isle of Man does it, I don't know. It's a hard place to spend any time on. You can drive from one end to the other in a couple of hours. It's between England and Ireland in the middle of the sea and apparently the sea trip there is very unpleasant in bad weather." But that location doesn't matter when you see the movie. "Really, it's remarkable that an art department and a designer can take what's essentially a one-story-high tin cowshed and create a four-stories-high Victorian pile in London. Believably! In this environment! I think it's miraculous really. The film industry is like that, y'know. Master illusionists."

One splendid scene is when Norman takes Beatrix to see her pages come off the press in a working printing museum. Noonan leans forward. "It's an amazing find for us, to be to be able to put the printing presses of the time on film, it was just a gift for the movie." And within that scene, there's more: an essence of the tangibility of authorship, of knowing that you're an author, seeing the product, the fruit of labor, emerge from the press, and seeing a quartet of small, square volumes being enveloped in brown Kraft paper and pulled taut with rude twine.

The tone of the dialogue is also neatly measured, with many deft lines that are charming, seemingly of the era, but not twee. Norman's quiet exultation is fine: "My dear Miss Potter, you are an author." You are here, it says. "There's a sort of whimsy to it all, yeah," Noonan says. Yet it's charming, it doesn't make you slouch in the seat with mild embarrassment. "I have an allergy to corn and to sentimentality," he continues. "The danger with this film I think was that it could have so easily have moved into sentimentality. Even though it has a very dramatic, difficult event within it, it's not a highly charged dramatic story. And the danger is that if it was to be made more Laura Ashley, more sweet, more susceptible to corn, it would make everyone sink! I have alarm bells ring in my head when it gets too far away from cynicism or a modern outlook. I just kept working it until it has as little as possible of that in it."

But Noonan, as in "Babe," has a sense of cinematic means, moments, tactile things: the wind of Potter's ruddy cheeks out a carriage window as horses gallop the London streets; a reluctant publisher's nose rabbiting at the sight of a bunny; the affecting naturalism of McGregor's reaction to a "yes": his face holds the lightest tremor, a tremble, shy of a smile. These are emotional things played in an understated fashion (but for a fine scene where Potter finally resists her parents: "We're parvenus, mother, social climbers!" as she mounts the family balustrade). "The other thing of course, is I want to play with cinema. This wasn't my very first time with Scope. I love playing with that [widescreen] frame. Now, when I'm faced with a problem of having to release it in seventeen different formats, the Scope sometimes becomes a problem." It's lovely, the potential psychological charge of screen space left unfilled, or that measures distances between characters. "Yes, indeed. I love to play with that. But I'm an instinctive filmmaker, generally, and I choose my frames and my camera moves according to the mood that takes me at the time. It's not a scientific process for me. I suppose some of it is pre-configured, and pre-planned, but most of the joy of the making of a film for me is the spontaneity of the whole process on the day, that a scene isn't shot, a scene isn't made, a scene isn't completely set until you've shot the last shot of the scene. And even then you can completely revamp it in the cutting room. I love that process of following the film rather than forcing the process to conform to your predetermined blueprint."

"Miss Potter" opens Friday.

(2007-01-02)

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