Miss Potter

The story of the woman who created Peter Rabbit, Miss Potter has been promoted as a light romance but is in fact a more substantial biopic. Though it doesn't try to analyse its characters in depth it does make an effort to explore their cultural background and its heroine's wider concerns, most notably her attempts to preserve the Lake District countryside from which she drew inspiration.

The problem with Renée Zellweger as an actress is that she has the voice and manner of a spoiled 12-year-old, but in Miss Potter she has finally found a character for whom she can make it work. Though 32 when we first meet her, Beatrix still behaves very much like a child, cosseted and stifled in an upper middle class household, unable to move on because she refuses to marry and nobody believes her capable of having a career. The film follows her journey into independence, both practically and psychologically, and Zellweger carries the role well enough, her natural tweeness coming across as appropriate eccentricity. Opposite her, Ewan McGregor turns in a performance which is subtler and more subdued than usual, balancing the film very well with just the right amount of charm. It's just a shame to see Emily Watson, more capable than either of them, reduced once again to a supporting role, even if this does provide the story with a extra layer of irony.

Unfortunately, despite the care taken with leading performances, supporting characters in Miss Potter are clumsily handled. Everybody who stands in the heroine's way is presented as cartoonishly ugly and obnoxious, utterly two-dimensional, and this does a lot of damage to an otherwise sympathetic tale. The film has a similar approach to events which it doesn't know how to handle, shifting a lot of the action offscreen, leaving viewers feeling excluded. As a consequencce it becomes hard to get close to emotionally just when that matters most.

Some of the technical work in this film is superb. There's stunning landscape photography which will really make you feel like you're there, and the brilliant editing makes it look much classier than most of its ilk. Early on there are several scenes in which Beatrix's imagined world - the one we know from her books - interacts with the real one. By and large these work well, creating the sense that she's not quite right in the head at the same time as charming the viewer and giving the impression, perhaps, that the film is going to take an altogether more daring direction, but sadly that's not to be. What's left is something which feels vaguely unfinished, as if it never quite made up its mind what it wanted to be.