Having said that, I whole-heartedly love “The Sound of Music,” and I have little doubt many viewers will warm to this cozy Netflix Original Movie. “The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society” is being released a mere three weeks after “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,” another summer crowd-pleaser tinged with melancholy. Both films are set largely on a gorgeous island, while pivoting between the present day and the vividly remembered past. At the heart of each narrative is a woman whose absence is deeply felt. Whereas Lily James portrayed the young Donna (Meryl Streep’s deceased “Mamma Mia!” character) in flashbacks, here she switches roles by sleuthing through the mysteries left behind by one of Guernsey’s most cherished inhabitants. As Juliet Ashton, an English author who maintains a “You’ve Got Mail”-esque correspondence with Dawsey (Michiel Huisman), the island’s most fetching bachelor, in 1946, James once again proves to be a luminous screen presence. Her fluttering eyelids and megawatt smile single-handedly held my interest in 2015’s pointless “Cinderella” remake, though thankfully in “Guernsey,” Juliet is far more proactive about severing the chains of her imprisonment. Moved by stories of the island’s literary club, which bonded the community amidst the despair of WWII, the writer sets out to meet its members in person, though not before her chauvinistic boyfriend, Mark (Glen Powell), slides an engagement ring on her finger, thereby marking his property before it’s shipped. When Juliet bristles at Mark’s claim that he let her leave, it’s only a matter of time before this love triangle arrives at its expected destination.
For all of its breezy charm, what makes “Guernsey” an often frustrating experience is the fact that the story uncovered by Juliet is exceedingly more interesting than the one she finds herself confined within. When she learns that the club’s rebellious founder, Elizabeth (Jessica Brown Findlay), is no longer present on the island, the author ventures to discover the truth of her disappearance, thus requiring James to spend many scenes asking, “What happened?”, until the reluctant witnesses cave. This process of manufacturing intrigue by withholding soon-to-be-revealed information—summoned up crumb by crumb—is a classic storytelling device, yet it tested my patience in this case, since the dominating narrative is throughly predictable from the get-go.
Time and again, the film consistently deprives us of the good stuff. We only get fleeting glimpses of the club’s spirited readings and debates, which are a joy to watch, especially with veteran talents like Tom Courtenay and Penelope Wilton in the mix. Courtenay’s best moment occurs as he delivers impassioned words directly into the face of a sleeping Nazi attending their meeting. “When respect for other people goes out the window, the gates of hell are surely opened and ignorance is king,” he declares, oddly echoing a famous passage in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s 1959 sci-fi novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz. A few sentences later, Miller notes that those who feed off ignorance fear literacy, “for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united.”
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