If you were looking for a template to base a movie about Princess Grace on, The King’s Speech probably wouldn’t leap to mind. And yet that’s what we get here. New to the throne of Monaco, former Hollywood glamour girl turned princess Grace Kelly (Nicole Kidman) is yet to make any real connection with her subjects or her duties – in fact, she’s actively considering going back to Hollywood and acting in Alfred Hitchcock’s latest movie. But when her tiny kingdom is threatened by France’s crazy demands that they start taxing their subjects and stop being a tax haven luring away French Corporations – and if you’re thinking ‘wait, why is that such a bad thing?’ you’ve spotted one of this often very silly film’s bigger problems – and her husband, Prince Rainier (Tim Roth), proves to be somewhat unlucky at diplomacy, it’s up to Kelly to knuckle down and do her best to use whatever skills she has to save her adopted home.
Dramatically this is a mess. The “crisis” around Monaco is certainly a legit one by the time France is threatening to invade, even if refusing demands to actually have a taxation system and stop being a millionaire’s tax haven seems like a point of principle that’s hard to get behind. But drawing Grace into affairs of state and having her save the day by – and this is not an exaggeration – hosting a big party and giving a speech about how great love is doesn’t exactly make her seem like a brilliant stateswoman.
As for her personal growth, while the director has said elsewhere he sees this as a film about an artist forced to give up her art, we’re never given much sense of Kelly as an actress (presumably if you’re coming to see this you’re already a fan), making the ‘will she or won’t she’ around her return to acting feel more like her thinking about backing out of the whole princess deal. Which would be fine if we ever had much of a sense of the relationship between her and the prince, but even that is sketchy at best.
Instead there’s some laughable stuff involving a sinister personal assistant (Parker Posey), Derek Jacobi is a count who teaches Kelly how to have facial expressions via a bunch of flashcards (who has cards made up that say things like “surprise” and “remorse”?) and there are loads of mirrors in every scene to make sure you know that Kelly was always being observed or something. It might not tell the story up to her death, but this whole film is a car crash.
Written by Anthony Morris