MISS POTTER

“Miss Potter” was listed in Netflix as being so popular that there would be a “very long wait.” So I waited and now it’s come and I’ve seen it. I’m disappointed, partly because my expectations were so out-of-sync with everyone else’s. Walt Disney meets Jane Austen: lots of dressups, not much introspection, bland acting, predictable events, and no attention whatsoever to Potter’s uncle and his attempts to get her very real scientific insights into the science circles for which she was qualified. Rather, her “feminism” was portrayed as a desire to have her own way and to not have to take care of her aging parents in their spoiled little lives. (They had family fortunes that meant they didn’t have to do anything for a living.) Emphasis was given to her own personal fortune from writing the Peter Rabbit books. No reflection was expressed on why they sold so well. Her life, according to this movie, consists of two romances: one ended when the young man died and the other a practical arrangement entered into at age 47.

It’s a beautiful movie, of course, because it’s filmed in the English Lake Country, though that place is really rather sombre and had to be tarted up with garden flowers unnatural enough to probably have been silk. And then there was a recreation of Farmer MacGregor’s garden. The only dark elements were the duenna who accompanied her everywhere as a young woman, an animated fish that grew bigger and bigger until it threatened to swallow a frog, and a raven shadow that flew through her animated drawing. These were supposed to indicate her state of mind, as though it weren’t enough that she was locked in her room, frantically drawing and not changing her clothes.

Zellweger, whom I saw in “White Oleander” but don’t remember maybe because it was another sentimental movie, is said to be “cherubic.” She played Potter with her mouth pursed up, making bird-like quick movements and squinting. She was best when she was drawing. Evidently they gave her drawing lessons and she quite enjoyed them. I always love to watch movie depictions of drawing and painting, but I’m divided about the animations. They were ever-so-slightly corny. Just a touch too twee.

One of the problems with the work of Beatrix Potter is that it has been so commodified with figurines, toys, games, stuffed animals, and the like -- some better and some worse -- that we’re weary. In fact, one might suspect that this movie was designed to give a shot in the arm to the marketing empire. Evidently Potter herself participated in this, was not above making enough money to be a potent conservationist, buying land to save it from development. This IS in the movie, though not really explored -- like everything else.

Infantilization is the opposite of feminism. It’s a long fight to keep women from being seen as children, to keep animals from being seen as children’s toys, to see “little” books as not being therefore trivial if cute -- fit mostly for children’s birthday party gifts. The serious messages of Felix Saalten’s “Bambi” or Carlo Collodi’s “Pinocchio” are lost in the Disneyfied versions. I suspect that the reason so many men are sexual predators of little children, esp. girls, is this belief that children are toys, harmless, with no will of their own. In short, SAFE, unlike the terrifying women unleashed by feminism: women who can refuse pregnancy and earn their own living. I suspect this wide-spread and deeply rooted conviction in our culture is a reaction to the shadow predator fishes and birds of our times, now so immense and alien that they are submarines and satellites -- both with malicious goals, terrorist intent. Being childish is meant to be a flight to safety, a denial of danger.

When I was a Unitarian minister, I constantly came up against this drive towards candified life, all sweet and bright. One Christmas I gave a series of meditations on “light” and spoke about the impressive sight of nuclear missile being loaded into it’s silo within sight of a Montana highway about 3AM -- a slender white missile bathed in white spotlight. The next day a delegation arrived to say I had destroyed their Christmas which was meant to be like “The Nutcracker Suite,” all innocent and prosperous. (No Freudian stuff please.) In short, Victorian -- though entirely neglecting some of the truly vicious and oppressive aspects of the Victorian world, the British Empire. So much of our sentimentality is, like white weddings, a valuing of ostentation that began in the Victorian era.

When I was in the “Wings of the Dove” bookstore in Lethbridge on Monday, I was impressed by how pastel everything was. Many little figurines of sentimental subjects like mothers with babies. Silk flowers everywhere. Bits of inspiring advice lettered onto the walls. Books about how to stay happy and find one’s inner child. Christian romances about how girls found perfect husbands by being virtuous (a quick perusal suggested virtue was largely a matter of obedience and self-sacrifice). Meanwhile, two doors up, messy animals and an equally messy tumble of interesting books engaged me far more.

Emily Watson is entirely wasted in this movie as the sympathetic sister of Potter’s doomed publisher boyfriend. Some reviewers have suggested that Watson, in spite of her Valentine face, would have made a more complex Potter. Zellweger was, after all, a “reach” since she is a Texan. Certainly Watson would have been a more complex figure and possibly she took this secondary role after being considered as the heroine and dismissed because of some of the high-tension and risky work she’s done in the past. But I’d like to see her cast in a new version, one NOT directed by the director of “Babe.” One that neither infantilizes nor commodifies her original work on plants, fungus, and algae.