Fridae

The other biopic to open this week stands in stark contrast to The Last King of England. Whereas the latter is fierce account of the sadistic tyrant Idi Amin, Miss Potter is a sweet, gentle, bunny-infested account of the creator of Peter Rabbit books, Beatrix Potter. Then again, with names like Mopsy, Flopsy and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle for the animal characters which she created, what other shape could the film have taken?

Renee Zellweger plays the title role, and while we've never thought of her as a particularly good actress, she is somehow right for this part. She imbues Beatrix with a soft yet steely centre, a playful and winsome charm that echoes the very books that Beatrix wrote. Chris Noonan, who directed Babe (1995), helms this.

The film begins in 1899 when Beatrix is already 32, unmarried, and desperate to escape her parent's restrictive upper-class household in England. Resigned to the possibility that she may never find love, she devotes herself to writing illustrated stories of little bunnies and frogs and porcupines. No one around her takes them seriously, until a young publisher Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor) decides to publish them. Romance slowly blossoms between the two, but unlike the pat happy endings of her children's stories, Beatrix's life story takes a turn for the worse.

What's wonderful about Miss Potter is that it doesn't try to manipulate our sentiments too much. It simply allows the story and character to evolve gradually and naturally until we come to know, like and even respect Beatrix as a woman who was with and ahead of her times. The film is as simple and old-fashioned a biopic as one could imagine. And yet, amazingly, it succeeds on those very terms.