When I was a child, my grandmother fed me warm, tasteless oatmeal in little ceramic bowls ringed by images of Peter Rabbit. Chris Noonan’s new biopic about the cotton-tailed prankster’s creator, Beatrix Potter, is the cinematic equivalent of those bowls’ contents. Confused about its identity and refusing to act as a serious piece of film biography, Miss Potter is a tepid and dull effort that’s ultimately too glutinous to choke down.

Why would Noonan choose to make a movie about Beatrix Potter in the first place? Potter’s life does not follow the kind of dramatic arc that lends itself naturally to film. And whatever psychological depth the author may have possessed, whatever conflicts she might have suffered through, are largely absent from first-time screenwriter Richard Maltby’s anemic script. In Maltby and Noonan’s hands, Potter is little more than a tediously whimsical eccentric. She posseses neither passion nor scars. The ever-pinched Renee Zellweger gives her meager life: an incessant, blinking, blushing “Oh my word” sufficing for characterization. When Potter falls for her publisher, Norman Warne (a hilariously mustachioed Ewan McGregor), the love that blooms and so angers Potter’s class-conscious parents couldn’t be any more G-rated and asexual. The film’s creators limit their depiction of Potter’s inner life to the occasional animation of her drawings. These sequences are gorgeous—and the film could have used more of them—but they don’t give enough of a sense of who Miss Potter really was.

What makes the film even more painful is how wonderful Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves, Punch Drunk Love) is in the role of Warne’s roly-poly, Whist-playing, neo-feminist sister. Watson delightfully chews up the scenery, and would have injected welcome colour and gusto into Zellweger’s role.

Near the end of Miss Potter, when Warne has died and Potter’s struggle with parental acceptance has been put aside, we learn that she is a passionate naturalist who yearns to save the Lakes District from creeping industrialization. As dramatic intritgue or political statement, it’s too little, too late. Not sure whether their subject is best suited for a love story, a psychological study or a tale of empowerment, Maltby and Noonan refuse to choose. Historical dramas only succeed when they resonate in contemporary times. Miss Potter rings hollow.

Miss Potter is now playing at Bayview Village (2901 Bayview Ave.), Cumberland (159 Cumberland St.) and two other locations.