Uneven 'Miss Pettigrew' has its charms

The Depression-era Cinderella comedy, "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day," is sporadically enjoyable and always gorgeous to behold -- it's a feast of Art Deco -- but it isn't quite worth a trip to the theater; its fate seems to be as a DVD rental.

Set in London on the verge of World War II, its title character (Frances McDormand) is a middle-age nanny -- a vicar's daughter with an easily offended sense of propriety -- who has somehow proved to be so irresponsible in her last few jobs that she has become unemployable.

In desperation, she pulls a fast one at the employment agency where she's been blacklisted and finagles herself a job as a social secretary to an ambitious bimbo American singer/actress (Amy Adams) who's nervously balancing three men on a string.

Over the course of a day spent mostly in high-society screwball situations, Pettigrew becomes indispensable to her boss and sorts out the lives of a half-dozen other characters whose snobbish vision is no match for her working-class wisdom.

It's a mismatched-buddy comedy if ever there was one, and one of its problems may be that the script doesn't allow the two opposite personalities to have an inspired conflict with one another: It's them against the world from the start.

As good an actress as she is, McDormand is at a loss to make her pithy character believable or endearing -- and she looks so unappealingly masculine in her glammed-up scenes that director Bharat Nalluri almost seems out to sabotage her.

Playing a version of her "Enchanted" character, Adams has more fun with the Marilyn Monroe-like role, and she's totally winning through the film's first act, though she can't hold up the spell and her character becomes less interesting the more we learn about her.

Still, the film is lovely to look at -- so overflowing with lavish furniture, jewelry and interiors that it's almost like a visit to Paris' Musée des Arts Décoratifs. If you're a fan of such things, "Pettigrew" is worth seeing solely for its sets.