You had me at hello… not again

My first encounter with the movie Miss Potter was its streamers above Food Choices in Glorietta. A big close-up of Renee Zellweger! She won my heart after Bridget Jones, Roxie Hart, and that yellow-green gown at the Oscars some years back. With her face on the poster, plus some or tagline about an “enchanting tale”, fairy that I am, I couldn’t help but be curious.

James and I saw the trailer when we watched 300. Apparently, the movie was about the Beatrix Potter, author and illustrator of the children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Apparently the movie told the story with a mix of real life and animation, a la Mary Poppins, to get into the author’s vivid imagination. It had me just giggling and squealing with delight, with its farmyard animals coming to life under Miss Potter’s paintbrush, bringing back childhood memories of a read-along book and tape Tatay have given me about Peter Rabbit, his brothers Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, and the mean Farmer MacGregor.

Speaking of MacGregor—the movie also starred Ewan, reuniting him and Renee for the first time since Down With Love. Renee, Ewan, and cuddwy cartoon bunny wabbits… how could I resist? I had agreed to sit through nearly two hours of Spartan violence with James… he had better sit through storybook nonsense with me.

Who can resist animated versions of these cuddwy bunny wabbits?

James and I caught the last full show at Eastwood last April 9. Over dinner, I had checked www.RottenTomatoes.com through my phone, and saw that Miss Potter had only gotten around 60% good reviews. Not spectacular, but not terrible either. And anyway, it had Renee, Ewan, and the cartoon bunnies! So we pushed through.

I had been looking forward to a magical movie that left you feeling giddy and like a child again. That was what the trailer had promised—the story of an author struggling to get her children’s book published in a less than childlike world. What a surprise when the book got published within the first half-hour of the movie—leaving me wondering what the plot's central conflict was for the rest of the film. Well, there was none, and for the remaining hour or so, all we had was a narrative with that neither left anything to the imagination nor offered any gripping tension to hold our attention, of a woman who went from eccentric to love-swept to philantropic, but who never really gave us any reason to care about her.

No reason for me to care about her.

And you know those movies where the trailers look great, but then when you watch the movie, it turns out that all the good scenes were already the ones in the trailer? I don’t remember what the past ones were, but Miss Potter is definitely one of them. (James remembers I bitched about The Prince of Egypt in the same way.) So much for a magical movie about a woman’s imagination—if I’d wanted magic and imagination, I could have just watched the trailer 100 times.

And the acting! It was Down With Love all over again with the campiness and the sheer lack of depth. But at least in Down With Love, it was deliberate, Renee was fabulous and Ewan took off his shirt. I said it earlier—we didn’t care about Renee’s character in this movie.

And just to stereotype myself as a Comm Major, just let me add—the movie’s camerawork called way too much attention to itself, and the editing was poorly-paced. (Hah! My four years of Comm amounted to something after all.)

So there. Nowhere as crappy as “You had me at hello”, but a letdown nonetheless from one of my most adored actresses. What's the point in my writing about a movie nobody will go see anyway (not when 300 is still playing on its nth week)? Nothing--I'm just really disappointed in one of my favorite actresses. Now excuse me while I go wash down the aftertaste with five or so doses of Chicago.