Don't scrutinize Miss Potter too closely or you might just think you were watching outtakes from Finding Neverland. There's a writer of beloved children's stories; it's a period piece and a major tragedy occurs that alters our writer's world.

Scanning the cast list you'd think there would be more fanfare for the film. It stars Oscar winner Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson and the wonderful character actors Barbara Flynn and Bill Paterson - yet it’s under the radar profile makes for some wide open interpretation as to its power. Especially as it comes from The Weinstein Company - distribution entrepreneurs whose over-the-top marketing schemes were legendary when they were known as Miramax. In this case, maybe they know something we don't.

While everyone knows of Beatrix Potter's lovingly illustrated books, few probably know the life of the author/illustrator herself. Miss Potter is the story of the English writer of the most successful children's books of all time. As played by Zellweger she's a feisty and single-minded soul who, displaying an independent spirit and obstinate pluck, contradictorily still lives under her parent's roof at the spinsterish age of 32.

Her mother (Flynn) doesn't understand her and her father (Paterson) spoils her. After her book "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" is accepted at the publishing house of Frederick Warne & Co. in 1902, Beatrix's life radically alters.

She becomes famous and wealthy when her rapid succession of stories become bestsellers. Her father, appreciating his daughter's success tells his disapproving wife, "Our daughter is famous, Helen. You're the only person who doesn't know it."

But Beatrix garners her mother's dismay in another way. She has fallen for Norman Warne (McGregor), the youngest brother in Warne & Co. and the designated scapegoat who has been assigned to be her publisher in an age where women were more wives than self-employed. The social gap between rich daughter and tradesman is too much for Mrs. Potter to bear. When the couple decide to marry, events happen that will forever define Beatrix Potter's existence.

While Miss Potter is charmingly rendered and earns its small laughs and few tears at all the appropriate places, it also pinpoints exactly that which is its problem. At a scant 92 minutes, Potter's joys and agonies are swiftly explained away rather than felt and hard as the actors try they are betrayed by the sketchy screenplay that dashes over the emotional plot points of the script. It's all so perfectly proper and polite and, well, English, that it's hard to find the grist and interior life in the characters or their situations. Truth be told, they are not particularly interesting as drawn, rarely do much that is out of sorts or deeply unkind and seem far less dimensional than the cute bonneted ducks and blue-jacketed bunnies that populate (and often spring to animated life) Potter's books.

Director Chris Noonan seems bored by the people in his film and more enchanted by the lush countryside and Lake District terrain that plays a character in its own right. At least it gives him a chance to use some artistic lighting and visual panache. As for those people, well, Zellweger is still content to purse her mouth and squint her eyes and be foot-stampingly proud while McGregor, reuniting with his Down With Love costar, is as earnest and true as he was in Moulin Rouge. Emily Watson as Norman's suffragette sister is game to play a supporting role that at least has a splash of depth, if only because she ultimately betrays her initial introductory convictions.

If only the filmmakers had gone a step further and let the tantrums and desire fly - instead Beatrix and Norman are like asexual moths flying round each other's light but never connecting in a meaningful way.

In the end, the only real individual who stands out is Flynn as a mother who, confused at her daughter's righteousness and ignorant of anything that lives outside her narrow scope and social register, isn't afraid to be a bit of a monster simply because it is all she knows as a flawed being living amongst this household of noble, sanctimonious and, sadly, uninspired, human counterparts.