Miss Potter (92 mins, 15)
Directed by Chris Noonan; starring Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson, Bill Paterson
Little Red Flowers (92 mins, 12A)
Directed by Zhang Yuan; starring Dong Bowen, Zhao Rui
Employee of the Month (108 mins, 12A)
Directed by Greg Coolidge; starring Dane Cook, Jessica Simpson, Dax Shepard
White Noise: The Light (108 mins, 12A)
Directed by Patrick Lussier; starring Nathan Fillion, Katee Sackhoff, Ed Anders, Joshua Ballard
Dark Horse (106 mins, 15)
Directed by Dagur Kari; starring Jakob Cedergren, Nicolas Bro, Tilly Scott Pedersen
Paris is Burning (71 mins, nc)
Directed by Jennie Livingston
The title, Miss Potter, refers not to Sally Potter, director of Orlando, nor to Pansy Potter, 'the Strongman's Daughter,' in the Beano, nor to some neglected sister of the better known Harry, but to Beatrix (1866-1943), creator of such immortal figures as Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck and Pigling Bland. It might well be that the last named so impressed Australian director Chris Noonan that he decided to wait a decade to follow up his debut, the jolly porcine parable Babe, adapted from Dick King-Smith's children's novel.
Sadly, he and his American screenwriter, Robert Maltby Jr, collaborator on several inconsequential Broadway musicals, have come up with a dull English Heritage film that will appeal neither to children nor discerning adults and will only add slightly to the already sizeable number of visitors to the Lake District.
The film should have been called 'The Potters of Kensington' for the way the repressed Beatrix escapes from her rich, snobbish Victorian parents home a la Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, or 'The Three Loves of Beatrix' inasmuch as it centres almost entirely on her passion for animals, her brief, tragic affair with her publisher Norman Warne and her companionate marriage at the age of 47 to country solicitor William Heelis.
The central shortcoming of this cliche-ridden, chocolate-boxy film is not the endless ways it distorts (actually flattens out) the facts. Nor is it the casting of Renee Zellweger: her English accent is quite acceptable and she looks like a sweet little animal, a hamster to be precise. It is that the movie turns an extraordinary life into an ordinary one and sells its heroine short.
The movie inevitably touches on her genius as an author-illustrator of children's books, but what interests the makers is the popularity and commercial success she achieved, not the nature of her art. Graham Greene, in a 1933 essay that was initially conceived and published as a parody of pretentious psychoanalytic criticism, rightly praised her as a major realist, 'an acute and unromantic observer, who never sacrifices truth for an effective gesture'.
This truth comes from a lifelong fascination with English flora and fauna that made her one of the great naturalists of her day. Sadly, the male-dominated scientific establishment refused to recognise her gifts, though the Linnaean Society was later to make certain amends.
The movie does praise her work as a conservationist, but this comes right at the end. By having her talk to her drawings (and having them come to life before her eyes), the film patronises her, making her out to be cute and whimsical. The most vulgar example is Jemima Puddle-Duck, wiggling her butt like a chorus-line floozie.
While Noonan and Maltby show Beatrix insisting on high standards of production and low prices, there is no mention of the tough business sense that made her a serious precursor of Walt Disney in the way she exploited her creations with merchandising spin-offs, or the manner in which, like Walter Scott, she helped save her publishers from bankruptcy when one of the partners fiddled the books and went to jail.
Symbolic perhaps of the film-makers' failure to deal seriously with her subject is a flashback in which the little Beatrix uses two pet mice to enact the genesis of her future classic The Tale of Two Bad Mice , only to break off before explaining what the story is about. If the film is pretty much a failure, production designer Martin Childs's attractive sets (forming a nice contrast between the Potters' town house and Hill Top Farm, Beatrix's Lakeland home) and Anthony Powell's tasteful costumes rise above their disappointing context.
Since I was three, my favourite Potter story has been Squirrel Nutkin (though it wasn't one of Greene's). It contrasts the exciting perils of being a rebel and the dull rewards of diligent conformity and involves what I later came to recognise as symbolic castration. By an odd coincidence, Zhang Yuan's impressive Little Red Flowers deals sensitively with this very subject. The picture is seen almost entirely from the point of view of Qiang, a four-year-old boy placed by his unseen parents in a well-run boarding school for the small children of Communist Party officials and well-connected professionals in what appears to be 1950s China.
For the best of reasons, or so it seems to them, the teachers organise the little kids' lives from morning to night in a kindly manner. Everything is regimented, from the way they dress to the practice of communal defecation. Though keen to earn the eponymous little red flowers given for tasks properly executed, Qiang rebels against the officious rituals. Though he briefly gets the others to join him, he's finally ostracised by his fellow pupils. The story is told with simplicity and insight and is among the best films from China within the past few years.
The lumpen American comedy, Employee of the Month, is also about a nonconformist. In this case, he's an uncharismatic slacker working in a Los Angeles warehouse store and competing with a slimy colleague over a pretty new cashier who'll only go to bed with the man named by their boss as employee of the month. The saddest thing about this unpleasant, mirthless film is that it's photographed by Anthony Richmond, the British cinematographer who shot Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now , The Man Who Fell to Earth and Bad Timing . I suppose this is the kind of thing you have to do after you've married and been divorced by one of Charlie's Angels.
Two years ago this very week in White Noise (a horror fantasy movie shot in Vancouver but set in the US), Michael Keaton gets in touch with his late wife and other deceased persons through EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon). In the equally solemn sequel, White Noise: The Light, Nathan Fillion sees his wife and son brutally murdered and then after an NDE (near-death experience) finds he can recognise people who are shortly to die by the bright aura that surrounds them. The film borders on the unintelligible and co-stars Craig Fairbrass, one-time regular on EastEnders. You'd have thought he'd have seen enough of death as a resident of Albert Square.
Just as uninteresting in its art-house way is Icelandic director Dagur Kari's Dark Horse, a whimsical comedy of a Danish layabout earning a precarious living as a graffiti artist in Copenhagen. There is five seconds' worth of colour to relieve the monotonous monochrome at the end, but it's a small straw for a dying film to clutch at.
Paris is Burning, British documentarist Jennie Livingston's 1990 film about the subculture of African-American and Latino drag artists, transvestites and transsexuals is fascinating, if overlong. The performers at their gay Harlem balls fulfil their fantasies by dressing up as anything from business executives to Marlene Dietrich and have developed their own version of Polari, the fabled gay slang.
