Nice slice of English pie but tasteless

Rating: 4/10 (2 September 2018)

This is a great movie to watch on a cold afternoon, wrapped up warm on the couch eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate.
It is a WW2 "lite" movie. It tells the story of two women (ostensibly); one, a woman who endured the hardships of the German occupation of the Channel Island of Guernsey during WW2 and the second, a successful author of light amusing stories who comes to Guernsey to meet the titular book club of which the former woman was a member and discovers her secret.
However, the movie makers went the commercial route of making a chick/rom-com flick instead. The producers didn't give the heroine author much of a character, you learn very little about her other than her trauma of losing her parents in the Blitz, and that she wants to write something important. The producers then keep the Guernsey woman character almost completely absent from the movie and turn on the British charm. The movie has gorgeous scenery - but not from the titular island - and stock 'eccentric' characters, looking healthy and well fed throughout, in lovely tweed suits and stylish hats and sexy pig farmer wear.
The movie veers from the book in several important ways, some to its detriment, e.g. - it removed substantial supporting characters and subplots and some to its improvement e.g. - it made the fiance character of Juliet's a much more decent suitor. In the book, you wonder why the author is with such a cad. Here you understand why she's attracted to him.
Still, the movie kept to the book in 2 important ways which sadly, take you out of what little reality the movie provides:
1. It makes the Germans dumb yet well versed in the English language enough to know what a Literary Society was and to accept that as an excuse for a drunk group smelling of BBQ to be breaking curfew in the middle of the night.
2. That a sophisticated and well educated woman would want to leave a booming literary career in post war sophisticated London for a pig farm in the middle of nowhere, no matter how handsome the farmer and that a pig farmer would want a wife who will not be helping with the pigs, but instead will want to be indoors writing full time and thus be little help at all to him. Even Beatrix Potter stopped writing when she became a farmer and rancher of sheep. Juliet seems to take great pride in her writing and career, but yet seems willing to give it all up to slop pigs.
It seems to be a story of PTSD suffering Juliet wanting to wallow in the past and painful memories of the war (in a tiny scene, her fiance picks up on that) along with the denizens of an isolated island with a pig farmer, rather than pick herself up and move on into the very bright future with her glamorous American diplomat suitor.
The WW2 scenes are interesting, as the German occupation of the Channel Islands and their horrendous treatment of the occupants is one of the many war stories not widely known. But expect the rest to be as predictable as tea time and as glossy as a coffee table book.