If there’s one thing that Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
does right, that thing is allowing Amy Adams to once again prove
to audiences that she’s a star. Despite the general blandness of
the film as a whole, Adams stands out above the rest, performing
with such an involving amount of vigor that her character proves
impossible not to like. During several passages of the movie,
her sparkling work made me forget about how utterly uninvolved I
was in the story and the other characters.
On the other hand, what good is Miss Pettigrew Lives for
a Day? Sure, Adams gets her chance to shine, but she
could’ve done the same thing in a better movie. We saw her do
precisely this in Junebug and Enchanted and
Charlie Wilson’s War. Hell, I could even make a case for her
work in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,
despite the fact that it was overshadowed by the bombastic
efforts of Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and Sacha Baron Cohen.
Not to mention, Adams doesn’t even have the lead role in
the film. The title Miss Pettigrew is played by a
snooze-inducing Frances McDormand, who hasn’t been more
uninteresting in her entire career. Pettigrew lives in England
and works as a nanny in the late 1930s, just before the outbreak
of World War II. As the British employment-rate declines as
wartime tensions reach their crescendo and Pettigrew is fired by
a family for being difficult to get along with, she finds
herself rejected by the nanny agency that she normally seeks
jobs through. This leaves her impoverished and on the streets.
Of course, Miss Pettigrew is too inventive (though, I
assure you, in the most conventional of ways) a protagonist to
stay unemployed for long. Before being thrown out of the agency,
she steals the address of a potential client, Delycia LaFosse
(Adams) and dashes to the woman’s home to pretend that she was
the lady recommended for the job. When Miss Pettigrew knocks on
the residence’s door, she is instantly welcomed by Delycia, an
amateur actress who needs Miss Pettigrew to nanny her many
boyfriends, not her children. There are three men in Delycia’s
life: Nick (Mark Strong), the owner of the home that she lives
in; Phil (Tom Payne), a West End producer she’s dating in the
hopes of scoring the lead role in his play; and Michael (Lee
Pace), a young and poor musician who her heart truly belongs to.
Miss Pettigrew finds herself unwilling to play Delycia’s bizarre
game, but Delycia won’t take no for an answer. A wild and
erratic day designed to please middle-aged-woman viewers
follows.
Despite its straightforward and uninspired premise, I
suppose Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day could have worked
had it been well played and executed on all counts. It doesn’t
even come close to doing this, however; the aforementioned Adams
is the only one to truly break out of its boring mold. The
dialogue is blasé and unimpressive, McDormand carries absolutely
no punch as the protagonist, and the love-triangle that emerges
in the plot feels cliché and predictable. The movie may go down
easy enough—it runs for a petite ninety minutes—but it certainly
isn’t impressive or memorable. Even if I was never pained by
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, I think I would’ve preferred
it to be a painful movie that challenged my idea of bad art
rather than the thoughtlessly mediocre effort that it is
instead.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 3.6.2008
Screened on:
2.26.2008 at the AMC Century City 15 in Century City, CA.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is rated
rated PG-13 and runs 92 minutes.
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