Miss Pettigrew
After my riding lesson I ran a few errands, and then treated myself to a movie. I’m an Anglophile and I love the nineteen twenties and thirties so I wanted to see Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day before it disappeared. It’s a slight little movie, and I don’t think it’s going to be around for too long.
It’s a great cast — Francis McDormand, and my personal heart throb from Persuasion and Rome, Ciarán Hinds, and the delightful Amy Adams from Enchanted. There’s some great music, and wonderful evocation of period. The director reminds you nicely that this is 1939 and the war is coming. The story is very predictable, but it ends up being comforting rather than annoying. It’s funny, sometimes when you can predict every step it becomes like a story the audience is telling along with the characters, and it creates a sense of community and shared experience. That’s what happened for me with this film.
My biggest objection is that they didn’t really take enough time to develop the three boyfriends who are pursuing Delysia. They became cut out figures, and stand-in’s for familiar stock characters. Perhaps they did that so the Cirán Hinds character would stand out more.
If you aren’t expecting too much this was a delightful way to wile away a couple of hours. I’m hoping to get to Leatherheads in the next few days. Guess it’s my week to sigh over very attractive men.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Yeah, that was pretty much my take on it. Slight, but charming.
April 11th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Also, the movie did get something about England in 1939: virtually anyone who was in their 40’s or older would have lost friends, sons, lovers and relations in the last war.
That generation and their parents were never free of the grief — the tenor of British life in the 20’s and 30’s, and things like the popularity of appeasement, makes no sense unless you keep this in mind.
The great psychological gap was between those who could remember the war and the next generations.
And the odds would have been even worse for someone like the Hinds character, who was obviously a public-school (in the British sense) boy; notice how he said he’d lost “nearly every schoolfriend I had”.
For example, of all the thousands of boys who’d been through Eton in the decade before 1914, only thirty-three _didn’t_ serve. Thirty-three!
5687 Etonians served, virtually every graduate who wasn’t disqualified by age or on physical grounds; 1160 were killed and 1467 were seriously wounded — about half the total in all, and that’s not counting PTSD and minor injuries.
Those were the lieutenants and captains who led their men ‘over the top’ and into No Man’s Land at the Somme and Second Ypres and Passchendale, like my grandfather, or stood with them in the trenches under the hammer of the guns and the poison-gas clouds.
Someone from the provincial middle class like Miss Pettigrew (you can tell from her accent) would be only slightly less likely to be bereaved.
There’s something inexpressably sad about the scene where she tells the younger woman: “I had my ambitions once too; a home, children, a life together… you would have thought him dull, but he was steady, and kind, and he smiled every time he saw me.”