Zellweger's face has utterly frozen into a human version of a scrunchie, and appears as if it will shatter into 1,000 pieces if an honest smile were to break out.
Miss Potter (2006)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:120
Fresh:79
Rotten:41
Average Rating:6.2/10
Consensus: A charming biopic with that maintains its sweetness even in sadder moments.
Runtime: 1 hr 33 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Dec 29, 2006 Limited
Box Office: $2,893,474
Synopsis: Beatrix Potter has delighted generations of children with her books. But she kept her own private life locked carefully away. Oscar-winning star Renee Zellweger is now bringing her secret story to... Beatrix Potter has delighted generations of children with her books. But she kept her own private life locked carefully away. Oscar-winning star Renee Zellweger is now bringing her secret story to the screen in "Miss Potter," the first film directed by Chris Noonan since his charming 1995 movie, Babe. It is set in the high summer days of late Victorian and Edwardian England, during which Beatrix develops her natural skills as artist and story-teller. When she finally publishes her debut book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, she becomes a writing celebrity. It also leads to courtship and her first love with publisher Norman Warne, played by Ewan McGregor. Their relationship and his marriage proposal in July, 1905, was to change Beatrix's life for ever. It was a love which she could not announce - or even talk about. In high-society London, her parents had insisted she keep it from friends and neighbours. They considered her proposed wedding a mismatch. Warne, they said, was from ‘trade' and demanded that she carefully reconsider their life together. Beatrix allowed herself to be persuaded to leave her fiancé and London. It was supposed to be a time for reflection and calm. But, instead, she faced tragedy and loneliness and returned, with a different outlook. She became a woman of strong views and independence. She also built up a farming dynasty in the Lake District - a dynasty over which she took charge long after her writing career virtually ended in 1913. It established her as a woman ahead of her time. Despite becoming the world's most successful children's writer and a wealthy landowner and prize-winning farmer, she never forgot her first love. -- © Weinstein Co. [More]
Starring: Renée Zellweger, Emily Watson, Ewan McGregor, Lloyd Owen
Starring: Renée Zellweger, Emily Watson, Ewan McGregor, Lloyd Owen
Director: Chris Noonan
Director: Chris Noonan
Producer: Mike Medavoy, David Thwaites, Arnold Messer, Corey Sienega
Composer: Nigel Westlake
Studio: Weinstein Company
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Reviews for Miss Potter
The photography is as pretty as a Potter watercolor. The style is as stiff as one of her own tiny hardbound books. Half an hour in, and you start looking about in vain for Farmer MacGregor's shotgun.
Miss Potter is not a motion picture for cynics. If you walk into this film expecting the grit of reality or a complex portrait of literary artistry at work, it's your own damn fault.
You keep waiting for another Beatrix to break out, to match the giddy passion shown by her bunnies or Amelia, but she does not.
Blackness may have lurked within the Potter heart, but you’d never know it from Miss Potter, which shifts the burden of ill humor onto the authoress’s petit-bourgeois mother.
The overall effect is a solid one-hour love story followed by a dramatized Wikipedia entry.
All-too-tasteful film, which is apparently aimed at mothers and daughters with far too much time on their hands.
Watching this horrifically twee film is like having your face pushed into a bowl of pot-pourri for 90 minutes in a two-star B&B somewhere in Cumbria.
Renee Zellweger's pretentious and unconvincing portrayal of Beatrix Potter doesn't help much to endear the viewer to the artist.
Pitched awkwardly -- neither for children nor cool young adults -- it’s very sweet, very nice and just the thing for a girlie matinée with mum and nan.
Beautiful, gentile, and oh-so-quaint, but utterly pointless and terminally boring. Zellweger's performance is both strange and misguided.
While it cannot sustain the fairytale enchantment of something like Finding Neverland, Miss Potter is, nonetheless, a worthy and sweet, middle-of-the-road biopic.
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