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Acting
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Directing
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Story
Starring: Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson
Director: Chris Noonan
Running Time: 93 mins
Miss Potter is a British film about the life of beloved children’s author Beatrix Potter, as her experiences blended with literary prowess to create some of the best children’s stories ever written.
A quaint but largely unspectacular biopic, Miss Potter does a nice job of detailing the story of the beloved author’s life, but doesn’t really go beyond a surface-level retelling of her biggest ups and downs, struggling to make a point about how her life experiences pushed her to write some of Britain’s favourite children’s stories.
Let’s start on the bright side, though, with the fact that Miss Potter is the perfect kind of movie to sit back and enjoy on a cold winter’s day. It’s got that quaint, cosy feeling which we all know Beatrix Potter stories conjure up so well, and that’s without a doubt the film’s biggest charm.
Coupled with lovely performances from Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson and more, as well as gorgeous costume and set design that makes a convincing but never excessively lavish portrayal of the time period, and this movie really is like a calming storybook.
However, as far as big screen biopics go, Miss Potter doesn’t exactly push many boundaries. While it occasionally throws in animated versions of classic Beatrix Potter characters, they don’t add all that much to the story beyond nostalgia value, and so the film comes off as rather one-note throughout.
Almost like reading a Wikipedia page of Potter’s life and then tasking some A-list actors with performing it, Miss Potter is a fairly by-the-numbers biopic that, while wonderfully sweet and perfectly watchable throughout, is by no means a spectacular or emotionally enthralling retelling of her life. So, that’s why I’m giving it a 7.3 overall.
