Arizona Reporter
by Harvey Karten
March 2008
By Harvey Karten - (AZR) New Yorker under the age of forty might look at the line for a Broadway play and find that only executives who attend directly from the office are wearing jackets and ties or, in the case of the fair sex, a skirt or a dress. The idea that theatergoers would line up at a TKTS discount booth would seem normal enough. But things were not always that way. Attending Broadway shows was once considered an exceptional event, the audience showing up in almost obligatory suits and ties and dresses, even tuxedos. The same used to go for nights out on the dance floor. Nowadays, young men and women scarcely touch when they dance and might not know a waltz from a candied yam. There again, in the good old days, people went to night clubs like (in New York) El Morocco and the Copacabana, dressed to the nines. If those clubs are still around, I would not even know, but formal wear has been relegated by most of us to a stodgier time.
For those who are not familiar with those days, principally during the 1930's and 1940s when Big Band sounds of Glenn Miller stomped out the beat of "Chatanooga Choo Choo" and "Tuxedo the Junction" and Tommy Dorsey's band hit the Billboard charts 137 times, everybody who was anybody used to swing. And swinging was a most public event, not a tete-a-tete in the bedroom.
Focus Features
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: B
Directed by: Bharat Nalluri
Written By: Simon Beaufoy, David Magee, from Winifred Watson's novel
Cast: Frances McDormand, Amy Adams, Shirley Henderson, Lee Pace, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds
Screened at: Dolby88, NYC, 2/21/08 Opens: March 7, 2008
Bharat Nalluri, a forty-three-year old India-born director known almost exclusively for TV episodes such as "Hustle," breaks out of the tube with "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day," adapted by Sion Beaufoy and David Magee from Winfred Watson's slim, fairly popular novel. Watson, who died in 2002, did not write like Evelyn Waugh about the British aristocracy, which Waugh both satirized and felt an attraction but about the American scene transported to her native London. Nalluri's movie could lead some in the audience to think, "Hey, the British were just like us" in their affection for night clubs and in the ambition of theater actors, singers and pianists to work not in London but in New York—then as now the center of the world.
Like the novel, the film is light and funny, playing in the opening scenes like a Feydeau farce—particularly given the stagy look of the Ealing-studio-made enterprise (not at all a critical comment since theater pieces often do well on the big screen). "Miss Pettigrew" is a fairy tale, a Cinderella story, which accounts for casting Amy Adams—best known for the role of a fairy princess sent out by a wicked witch to New York in Kevin Lima's "Enchanted." Delysia (Amy Adams) is a ditzy, wide-eyed London-based blond who, unknown to her fans, grew up with her blue-collar family in Pittsburgh. She depends on the kindness of near-strangers to eke out the high life, bending over backwards, as it were, to please three boyfriends. She loves only Phil (Tom Payne), who accompanies her singing on the piano, but Phil has no money. She therefore balances two other bf's who can give her what she needs—night-club owner Nick (Mark Strong) who gives her a job, and Phil (Tom Payne), who casts people in major London theaters. By comparison and contrast alike, Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDorman) is a governess who, as shown in the book but not the film is not particularly fond of children. Since Britain has a depressed ecnomy in 1939, she is without hopes of employment after being dismissed from her last gig, wanders around the soup kitchens, and by accident falls into the employ of Delysia who is being "nice" to boyfriend Phil inside Nick's flat and must disappear quickly as Nick approaches the building (thus the Feydeau farce element).
Pettigrew becomes the "social secretary" of the desperate actress. During the course of a single day in their lives, Pettigrew is to morph from her dowdy outfit into classy togs, catching the eye of prominent fashion designer Joe Ciaran Hinds, who is closer to her in age and who will consider dumping his young girlfriends when he finds commonality with him. Love at first sight blooms not only between the title character and the fashion designer but between Pettigrew and Delysia, as Pettigrew advises Delysia on ways to iron out her romantic overchoice to the one most suited for her. Carpe diem applies to her as well, all while England is on the cusp of war. What a difference a day makes.
It takes time to become accustomed to the hyperkinetic, bimbo-ish Delysia. She flitters around Nick's apartment like a middle-school kid who forgot to take his Ritalin, scarcely noticing Pettigrew, but as the film progresses, she calms down, thinks as rationally as a ditzy woman can think, and displays her acting charm. The film belongs, however, to Frances McDormand, best known as Marge Gunderson, a pregnant police chief in the Coen Brothers' film "Fargo," but McDormand also has a resume chock full of stage credits—she received a Tony as Stella Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire--which makes her a natural for this theatrical movie.
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