RobW

Prettily photographed but on the whole fairly shallow account of Potter's romance with the publisher of her children's books. Unfortunately for the film's makers, her love affair was conducted very demurely so there's not much to work on. Little is made even of this; no mention for instance is made of Potter's credible and serious scientific ambitions. Filmically, it descends into cinematic clichés; for instance, the lovers exchange letters, so we are treated to shots of Potter scribbling with a voice-over of what she writes. She hurries to London so shots of her jumping into cabs, trains etc. The last part of the film we are treated to pretty shots of the Lake District; pity, then, no mention is made of her very substantial contribution to the National Trust, and only passing reference to her important role in sustaining local community life.

The film follows the plot of the novel if anything too closely, and in the process exposes the non-sequiturs and irrelevancies. As a film it has to tackle the problem of how to cover the lengthy explanations of the plot and fails the test. The characters are left to engage in wordy debates which is simply not cinematic. I found myself repeatedly looking at my watch and muttering 'get on with it, do!' Sir Ian McKellen gives good value, and is probably the main reason for sticking with it. The downside of that is that when he is not on screen the pace slackens considerably. About half an hour from the end I thought it had reached its climax and was reaching for my hat and heading for the exit when I realised with dismay it was lumbering off on another twist of the plot. Bonus points though for having the French characters speaking in French.

Well, it's prettily photographed ... but that's about all I can think of to say for it. It's based on one of those derivative novels - this time Stevenson's classic novella "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" as seen by his parlourmaid(!) the eponymous Mary Reilly. Possibly she is superwoman in disguise because she seems to run an enormous Edinburgh house more or less single-handed (the other household staff, all four of them, don't appear do anything very useful about the place). This includes cleaning, washing-up, gardening (converting the stone-flagged yard of an Edinburgh town house?!) while running all over Edinburgh on errands for Dr Jekyll for whom she nurses an ill-concealed passion. The dialogue is dreadful; banality separated by long meaningless pauses to spin this tosh out to what seems an interminable length. My sister and I watched it on DVD ... she said "can't you fast forward it?" I replied "I *am* fast forwarding it!" If you have the misfortune to come across this, do something more interesting like stare at the wallpaper.