Charming but Still Overbaked

Rating: 7/10 (5 September 2018)

GRADE: B-
THIS FILM IS RECOMMENDED.
IN BRIEF: A romanticized view of WWII and British rural life.
JIM'S REVIEW: The British love a good period romance story. Period.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society fills the bill for those in need of a slightly charming tale of love and a whiff of mystery. Lots of picturesque cliffside views, fields of wildflowers and stone cottages, a bucolic setting which seems like a travelogue for a simpler way of life, the kind of rural village where Miss Marple would reside, minus the murders. There's plenty of quirky town-folks minding their manners and own business and keeping their little secrets and lies well hidden.
The time is 1945, and author Juliet Ashton comes to hear of the literary group and begins to question their historic origins as inspiration for an upcoming article. This fascination leads her to the island of Guernsey where she meets the book club and its members including a handsome pig farmer in the group named Dawsey Adams. As Juliet investigates and researches her story which leads her to the German occupation five years earlier and its effect on the town, she discovers a direct correlation with the casualties of war and this reading circle of friends.
Mike Newell directs his film straightforwardly, without much flair. He tends to sanitize the proceedings. Everything is a tad too clean and polished. (The pig farm seems to be spotless and idyllic; at times, I expected the cute piglets to start speaking aloud ala Babe.) In fact, nothing in the film has any period authenticity. It is all dress-up time in 40's era clothing and set design. The mystery subplot is quite predictable and vastly underplayed. The actions of some of the characters make no real sense except to advance the plot to its inevitable romantic outcome.
However, he assemblies a fine cast of British actors, familiar faces from Masterpiece Theatre imports and independent British fare: Penelope Wilton (strong as always), Matthew Goode, Glen Powell, Jessica Brown Findley, Katherine Parkinson, and Tom Courtney, all good, even if the story is a trifle. Lily James and Michiel Huisman, both quite likable performers, play the misfit lovers, without much chemistry between them. (They share one of the least passionate kisses ever filmed.) Oddly, they are more convincing in their separate scenes with the other actors.
Still, the film entertains throughout, although its conclusion is, pardon the pun, hogwash for the realists in us all. (Yet the romantics out there just might wallow in the film's cheap sentimentality.). While The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is never (sorry!) "unappeeling", it left this moviegoer expecting more. In all honesty, the title is more interesting than the film itself.