The poorly received Grace of Monaco has been turned into a Lifetime movie. It doesn't get much worse than that.
 |
| "Let's all stand around and look at the train wreck of a movie." |
How do you
take a true story as rich as the life of Grace Kelly, populate it with some of
the finest actors in Hollywood, lavish it with all the lush period décor of the
film’s setting and end up with one of the most ridiculous, farcical
contrivances of the year?
For all the talent
behind and in front of the camera, not since Lawrence Kasdan’s Dreamcatcher has a film with such
promise behind it gone awry in such a startlingly wacky fashion. From the director of the award-winning La Vie En Rose, Olivier Dahan has
delivered what has been dubbed by many as ‘the worst film in the history of the
Cannes Film Festival’. Claiming to be a
character study of Grace Kelly and not a biopic, Grace of Monaco is a fairy tale of revisionist history so
overproduced by its makers and so overplayed by its cast that it seems to exist
as a bone dry object full of silly colorforms instead of believable
characterizations.
Set in
1962 France during a tumultuous battle between Monaco’s Prince Rainer III (a
dull and tone deaf Tim Roth) and Charles de Gaulle (André Penvern), Grace Kelly
(Nicole Kidman) is torn between resuming film work on Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie and becoming the princess of
Monaco. An odd advocate of tax evasion,
the rest is hard wooden padding out of Arash Amel’s dreadful script with some
of the most cloying dialogue heard in years, made all the more embarrassing by
how hard the actors try to sell it.
You
could make the argument Dahan is going for homage to a bygone era of the Golden
Age of Hollywood cinema, but the melodrama here is so extreme you are
immediately whisked from the film the moment its characters begin to
speak. Nicole Kidman, an otherwise
terrific actress, is reduced to a bug eyed fish out of water here, as Dahan’s
camera presses uncomfortably against her face for no apparent reason, a tactic
he seems to relish in over and over again.
You could take any scene from the film, out of context, and shrivel up
with embarrassment at the sight of great actors falling flat
on their asses. Really, on a scale of
one to ten, everyone in this film has the volume turned up to level
eleven.
 |
| "Hello, We're bored." |
The whole
thing has the appearance of an Oscar bait picture but the voice and intellect
of a dilettante. Rejected almost
immediately by Kelly’s estate as pure fiction, Dahan’s defense read something
like ‘I’m not a journalist or historian. I am an artist’. If facts don’t matter in Dahan’s fantasy
land, then why associate it with a real person at all? Since Dahan doesn’t consider his film to be a
biopic, just what the hell is it then?! Much
was made of the public feud between industry mogul Harvey Weinstein and Dahan
over final cut, resulting in indefinite distribution hell for U.S. audiences before
ultimately being dumped on the cable television network Lifetime and shortened
even further.
That it exists in an era
where films like Jupiter Ascending or
even Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas manage
to obtain theatrical distribution over something with presumably an A-list cast
and director behind it only makes the miserable failure of Grace of Monaco all the more humiliating for its creators.
-Andrew Kotwicki