Turtle Diary

Jackson plays an unmarried lady who writes children's books under the pseudonym of Delia Swallow, and Kingsley a sales clerk living in limbo between a Bloomsbury bookshop and Fulham bedsitland: two lonely people drawn out of their shells by an elaborate heist to liberate the turtles from London Zoo. Absent, however, is the American-born Russell Hoban's quizzical perspective on his uptight Brits in his novel. What's left is not quite Delia Swallow for grown-ups; but the bland world this film inhabits is almost as quaint, complacent and parochial.