Londoner Winifred Watson, who died in 2002, lived to be 95, but not quite long enough to see her 1938 novel hit the silver screen. The novel would have already been 36 years old by the time the movie’s co-star, Amy Adams, was born, but you wouldn’t know it by her Carole Lombard-esque turn as the flouncy American actress/singer whose simultaneous romances with three men stun and appall her new “social secretary” (Frances McDormand). She also shines in the duet of the (very) old Ink Spots hit “If I Didn’t Care.”
McDormand, for her part, nails the London accent, and the provides the counterweight to Adams’s fluffy (though engaging) performance. Truth be told, the screwball comedy parts don’t work nearly as well as the aspects of the story emphasizing her down-on-her-luck housekeeper. In her, you are reminded of the England still emerging from the Depression, and the desire still in the hearts of women too old to be the subject of romantic comedies. And yet, that’s what this is, in a way. Although the actual romances here are of the traditional Hollywood type (and only slightly more risqué), the real story is about the whirlwind affair between the flighty-but-kind actress and the prissy-but-kind Miss Pettigrew.
And to those who plead that this rags-to-riches-to-romance story cannot happen in a day, or possibly not at all, and that I have criticized other movies for the sins of this one, I have no defense, other than to say that it works here.
IMDB link
viewed 3/6/08; reviewed 3/9/08
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