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Uptown Magazine - Winnipeg's Online Source for Arts, Entertainment & News

March 13, 2008


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2008-03-13

A confounding spot of bother

Comedy of manners becomes a 'mom flick' real quick

(Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, now showing)

C+

I don't know if it was the jet lag, but only at the hour-and-21-minute mark of the press screening for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day did I realize that nothing was going to happen in the movie.

This should be a warning to you devoted readers who aren't the kind of cinÈ-buffs who get off merely by watching Frances McDormand interact with a cast of flakey, misplaced Gatsby-era characters in an odd-seeming WWII Hollywood, I mean, London.

Down-and-out temp agency lady, Miss Pettigrew (McDormand), finds herself entwined in the life of aspiring performer/starlet Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams), in which, for a day, she pretends the part of social secretary. Initially, penniless and unemployed, Miss P's motives are purely survival-based, but soon (and since the story takes place in one day, I guess this would be before lunch) she takes a liking to Delysia's lifestyle. Before she knows it, Miss P is Miss Lafosse's dearest confidant - a soulmate in amongst Delysia's ferris wheel of bedmates. When Delysia must choose which man to keep, who do y'all think will provide the wisdom for the proper love choice?

Miss Pettigrew... is the kind of thing Mother would like, especially with all of those sneaky-sounding bass lines and jazzy ivory-tickling that dictate the mood constantly. In this 'mom film,' Brit director Bharat Nalluri conflates several epochs (the style of the 1920s, the setting of the 1940s and the sexual mores of several different generations), as if it won't matter to the audience. Doesn't he know that this only kind of worked in Dirty Dancing?
— Walter Forsberg

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