Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day

Director: Bharat Nalluri
Year: 2008
Rating: **

I read a great review of this before seeing the film on my own in a 250-seater, an experience which was simultaneously cool and weird, as it left me free to laugh and stretch my legs and yet forebodingly sure that someone would bludgeon me, free of consequence. My elaborate fantasies aside, said review contended that this was Frances McDormand’s best work since Fargo and a masterfully etched day-in-the-life with hardly a flaw. The closest it came to actual criticism was to note that the title was less-than-ideal (an excellent point). Sadly, it was only after returning home, bludgeon free, that I found a more accurate review that made note of this movie’s mediocrity in a way which would have allowed me to delegate this to the renter list, where it belongs.

Yes, Frances McDormand is a good actress, but there’s nothing particularly smashing about her portrayal of this oddball title character. She plays a down-on-her-luck middle aged Brit who happens upon a nannying position in the household of Amy Adams, only to find that it’s not a nanny who’s needed, but rather a mother – for Miss Adams! She sorts her way through the mess of romances at hand and each woman manages to impart some of her own kind of wisdom to the other before inevitably parting ways a day later.

Lee Pace is adorable even away from the set of Pushing Daisies, but he and Ciarán Hinds are both merely predictable accessories to the somewhat sedentary plot. Amy Adams is now firmly established as being quite good at playing the doe-eyed-damsel reminiscent of her role in Enchanted, but I’m already ready to see her branch out. The WWII era costumes are beautiful and I quite liked the music, but other than that, the movie is underdeveloped and it’s therefore unsurprisingly ridiculous that the characters end up the way they do in the amount of time allotted.