14 DAY TRIAL // “Grace of Monaco,” directed by Olivier Dahan and produced by Harvey Weinstein through The Weinstein Company, opened the Cannes Film Festival 2014. The first reviews are already in and, sadly for everyone involved, they spell a major disaster.
The film had been surrounded by controversy even before it screened for the first time for larger audiences, at Cannes. First off, the Royal family had panned it, saying it was pure fiction, lies stringed together and sold as truth, despite protests from leading lady Nicole Kidman and the director that this was not a biopic per se, but a fictionalized story inspired by real events.
Secondly, Weinstein and Dahan came to blows about the final cut of the film and their disagreement was so severe that Weinstein shelved it for US distribution indefinitely. Initially, “Grace of Monaco” was supposed to be out in theaters last year.
The third blow has come with the Cannes screening and it could very well be one that will shelf the film in all territories as an unmarketable, undistributable mess, various publications in film are saying.
“Grace of Monaco” stars, besides Kidman, Tim Roth, Frank Langella, Parker Posey, Paz Vega and Robert Lindsay.
Perhaps the most scathing review is from The Telegraph and it has already gone viral. Including terms like “silly,” “farce,” “embarrassment,” “thoroughly awful” and “horror,” the only nice thing this publication has to say about the film is that costumes used in it are “unironically great.”
“It played to an audience of international critics, who even by the end of the first scene had started curling up, like startled armadillos, into tight little balls of embarrassment. Later, as the house lights came up, I watched a team of the festival’s beige-suited stewards hurriedly roll them out of the auditorium, like the barrel-trundling villagers in Whisky Galore,” The Telegraph reviewer writes.
Empire Online also deems the film a dud, comparing it in visuals to Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge,” which also opened Cannes in 2001 and also starred Kidman. However, unlike “Moulin Rouge,” “Grace of Monaco” is not meant to be funny, even though it does come across as hilariously awful, the reviewer says.
The Guardian is just as blunt in its write-up of the screening: “The resulting film about this fantastically boring crisis is like a 104-minute Chanel ad, only without the subtlety and depth. Princess Grace herself is played by Nicole Kidman, wafting around the Palace with dewy-eyed features and slightly parted lips which make her look like a grown-up Bambi after a couple of cocktails, suddenly remembering his mother’s violent death in the forest.”
Most reviewers agree that costumes are spectacular and that Nicole Kidman is one of the most talented actresses of our times. However, they stress, neither can save this film, which is drowned by a simplistic, unintentionally funny script and an obvious desire to favor style over substance.
With this in mind, assuming “Grace of Monaco” ever sees the light of day in a movie theater near you, do you plan on seeing it? Let us know in the comments section below.