Movie Log: Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day

I was feeling grumpy on Wednesday night -- if you recall, that was when I sprayed sarcasm all over a perfectly nice SF Signal "Mind Meld" piece -- so Netflix, in its infinite wisdom, delivered me a light frothy period comedy to ease my trouble soul.

Or so I thought. Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day isn't quite as frothy as it seems, though Amy Adams -- as the young would-be starlet Delysia Lafosse -- whips up quite a lot all by herself. (And here's a factoid that will be of interest to no one but myself: The Wife and I saw this movie on Ms. Adams's birthday. Happy birthday, Amy.)

Miss (Guinevere) Pettigrew, as played by Frances McDormand, is a worn-down fortyish nanny, fired precipitously from the last of a long series of ill-fitting jobs as the movie opens. It's 1939 London, and jobs are hard to find to begin with. Pettigrew is penniless, with only the clothes on her back, and hungry as well. The agency that has placed her in the past refuses to give her another chance, so she grabs one herself and tries to poach what she thinks is a nanny job from the agency.

Delysia actually wanted a social secretary, but, when Pettigrew shows up, her most urgent need is to get naked Boyfriend #1 (Phil the young theatrical producer, played by Tom Payne, whom she has just allowed to have his way with her in return for the lead in his new show) out of the bed in the huge expensive apartment in which she is kept by Boyfriend #2 (Nick the nightclub owner, played by Mark Strong) before said Boyfriend #2 makes it over there himself for some morning nookie.

Pettigrew deals with the situation, and stays with Delysia throughout that day, going to a lingerie show in the morning and meeting Boyfriend #3 (Michael, as played by Lee Pace, a poor-but-honest pianist who just got out of prison and wants to make an honest woman of Delysia) in the afternoon. She also gets caught up in the romance of a couple nearer her own age: Edythe the owner of a fashionable shop (Shirley Henderson) and Joe the designer of lingerie (Ciaran Hinds). Pettigrew had seen Edythe cavorting with another man the evening before, but she was at a soup kitchen at the time, so she and Edythe hold each other's secrets uneasily.

Everything comes together in the end, first at a big party at Delysia's place -- where, as my wife put it, "There's a party in the apartment one boyfriend owns, where another boyfriend will play piano while the third boyfriend announces who will get the lead in his show" -- and then during her set at Nick's club later that night.

I'm leaving out several of the additional complications, but they all involve the same few people -- the only one I haven't mentioned yet is Charlotte "the Rabbit" Warren, who is also up for the part in Phil's show, and she only has a few lines. The same people bump into each other, over and over again, all day, and pair off conveniently so that they can have important conversations.

Miss Pettigrew is a nice movie, but it's a quite manipulative one, with a mailed fist of a moral semi-hidden in the velvet glove of Delysia's various vampy outfits. Pettigrew comments, early on, about the scandalousness of Delysia's life, but we expect that in our period movies -- surely this will be the story of Pettigrew learning to loosen up and live a little, like a thousand other movies about people in corsets? Actually, not: Miss Pettigrew is an older style of story; it's about how Pettigrew helps Delysia to grow up. It's not as funny as it looks like it might be, but it's a perfectly serviceable movie about developing a stiff upper lip. (And, given that it's set in London on the eve of WW II, that's quite appropriate.)

Miss Pettigrew is also based on a novel of the same name by Winifred Watson, originally published in 1938. I'd never seen or heard of the book before I heard of the movie, so I can make no comparisons between them.