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Trailer for "Miss Potter"

You’ll learn a whole lot more about children’s book author Beatrix Potter from a minute of investigation online than you will from all 90 minutes of Miss Potter. Raised in Victorian respectability by parents of inherited wealth for whom she kept house as an adult, Potter (played by Renée Zellweger) didn’t strike out on her own until the age of 36, when her story The Tale of Peter Rabbit was first published. In this film, directed with storybook inoffensiveness by Chris Noonan (Babe, the one about the talking pig, not the one with John Goodman as Babe Ruth), Potter’s book is shepherded to success by Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), the son of a publishing family that has little faith in his capability to succeed in the business world. Success and tragedy ensue until Potter finds her calling late in life as a conservationist, using the substantial earnings from her books to buy up farms in rural England in order to protect the land from development. It’s all very pleasant, just the thing to take you grandmother to see (especially on a weekend when the only other major film opening is 300). If you must take your daughters to it, though, do them the favor of letting them know that prior to her publishing success, Potter was a skilled student of botany, who, though denied a chance to study at the Royal Botanical Gardens because of her gender, contributed scientifically admired drawings of lichen and fungi otherwise visible only to a microscope. (In 1997, the Linnean Society of London issued a posthumous apology to her for refusing to allow her to present a botanical paper that was instead delivered by her uncle.) In other words, just because she will be remembered by every child who sees this film as having the face of Ms. Zellweger, that’s no reason for her to be thought of as a simp.