Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
I went into Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day figuring Lee Pace would be the best part of it, and...he actually may have been the worst. Mostly this is because the film was much, much better than I thought it would be, and partially it is because that poor man cannot do an English accent to save his soul. Oh, Lee. I love you and your eyebrows of awesome, but you really need to stick to playing Americans.
I Netflixed this movie on...well, basically because it had Lee Pace in it and it was set in the thirties. The last time I did something like that I wound up watching part of the execrable Moonlight Serenade, so I thought this might be similar. In fact, it was most excellent. Frances McDormond manages to be understatedly funny, dignified, and wise all at the same time as Miss Pettigrew, and Ciaran Hinds did a nice transformation from shallow to contemplative. Shirley Henderson was excellent as a scheming fashion designer, and Amy Adams...well, okay, I kind of hate Amy Adams, but she didn't irritate me as much as usual this time around. Lee Pace plays what I think will be his typecast role--a passionate and steadfast True Believer in love. I think he would've done better without the fake accent hampering him, but he wasn't bad.
The story itself--nanny Miss Guinevere Pettigrew gets fired and sort of scams her way into a "social secretary" position for aspiring actress Delysia LaFosse (Adams), then spends a day following her wild and crazy charge, getting mixed up in her three concurrent romances as well as the tempestuous relationship of Edyth (Henderson) and Joe (Hinds), a lingerie designer--was entertaining enough on its own, with poor fish-out-of-water Miss Pettigrew being both shocked and titillated by the high life before finally deciding that these people are all shallow and either telling them off or encouraging them to become less shallow. Hard to go wrong with hijinks and manic energy. But what I really liked was that Guinevere and Joe bonded over the fact that both of them were old enough to remember the horrors of WWI when all the young people at the party they were attending were oohing and aahing over the fighter planes flying overhead, or after the air raid drill. There was another very nice scene where Guinevere (who'd been secretive about her love life) told Delysia to marry Michael rather than sticking with the superficial twats she'd been dallying with, and back it up with a story about losing her boyfriend "in the mud in France" in the last war. The context of the war gave the film a really poignant feel that wouldn't have been possible without it. (The book was apparently written in 1938--I wonder how much of that was in the novel, and how much hindsight allowed the screenwriters to add.)
The ending was a little unbelievable after the seriousness injected by those two scenes, though. First of all, I have a feeling Michael and Delysia aren't going to be happy together, to put it mildly--honestly, it seemed like she was really enjoying playing the field, and didn't want to settle down. I foresee problems. However, he did take her to New York at the end of the film, and not getting bombed is not a bad thing.
Second...okay, I guess it's nice that Guinevere and Joe ended up together, but seriously, they'd had, all total, less than ten minutes of conversation before he found her at Victoria station the next morning and asked her to marry him. I bought that, because of his interaction with her, he was going back to designing men's socks rather than lingerie and giving up the associated superficiality of the high fashion world. I did not quite buy that he wanted to marry her so quickly. Then again, the proposal was merely implied very heavily; with a lot of squinting, I think I can make it read that he wanted her as a business partner, and to, you know, get to know her before making any kind of proposal.
But then again, the whole scene was very charming, and I can almost forgive its implausibility just because I kind of adore it when two people connect over being the sole sensible folks in a sea of fools.
So you should all go watch the movie. Especially you, rowdycamels, and all the other Lee Pace fans I have on my flist.
I Netflixed this movie on...well, basically because it had Lee Pace in it and it was set in the thirties. The last time I did something like that I wound up watching part of the execrable Moonlight Serenade, so I thought this might be similar. In fact, it was most excellent. Frances McDormond manages to be understatedly funny, dignified, and wise all at the same time as Miss Pettigrew, and Ciaran Hinds did a nice transformation from shallow to contemplative. Shirley Henderson was excellent as a scheming fashion designer, and Amy Adams...well, okay, I kind of hate Amy Adams, but she didn't irritate me as much as usual this time around. Lee Pace plays what I think will be his typecast role--a passionate and steadfast True Believer in love. I think he would've done better without the fake accent hampering him, but he wasn't bad.
The story itself--nanny Miss Guinevere Pettigrew gets fired and sort of scams her way into a "social secretary" position for aspiring actress Delysia LaFosse (Adams), then spends a day following her wild and crazy charge, getting mixed up in her three concurrent romances as well as the tempestuous relationship of Edyth (Henderson) and Joe (Hinds), a lingerie designer--was entertaining enough on its own, with poor fish-out-of-water Miss Pettigrew being both shocked and titillated by the high life before finally deciding that these people are all shallow and either telling them off or encouraging them to become less shallow. Hard to go wrong with hijinks and manic energy. But what I really liked was that Guinevere and Joe bonded over the fact that both of them were old enough to remember the horrors of WWI when all the young people at the party they were attending were oohing and aahing over the fighter planes flying overhead, or after the air raid drill. There was another very nice scene where Guinevere (who'd been secretive about her love life) told Delysia to marry Michael rather than sticking with the superficial twats she'd been dallying with, and back it up with a story about losing her boyfriend "in the mud in France" in the last war. The context of the war gave the film a really poignant feel that wouldn't have been possible without it. (The book was apparently written in 1938--I wonder how much of that was in the novel, and how much hindsight allowed the screenwriters to add.)
The ending was a little unbelievable after the seriousness injected by those two scenes, though. First of all, I have a feeling Michael and Delysia aren't going to be happy together, to put it mildly--honestly, it seemed like she was really enjoying playing the field, and didn't want to settle down. I foresee problems. However, he did take her to New York at the end of the film, and not getting bombed is not a bad thing.
Second...okay, I guess it's nice that Guinevere and Joe ended up together, but seriously, they'd had, all total, less than ten minutes of conversation before he found her at Victoria station the next morning and asked her to marry him. I bought that, because of his interaction with her, he was going back to designing men's socks rather than lingerie and giving up the associated superficiality of the high fashion world. I did not quite buy that he wanted to marry her so quickly. Then again, the proposal was merely implied very heavily; with a lot of squinting, I think I can make it read that he wanted her as a business partner, and to, you know, get to know her before making any kind of proposal.
But then again, the whole scene was very charming, and I can almost forgive its implausibility just because I kind of adore it when two people connect over being the sole sensible folks in a sea of fools.
So you should all go watch the movie. Especially you, rowdycamels, and all the other Lee Pace fans I have on my flist.