You can’t blame Nicole Kidman for wanting to stretch her thespic wings—after all, if she didn’t risk portraying offbeat characters like the suicidal Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours,” she wouldn’t have won a Best Actress Oscar in 2003!
She had also earned praise for playing a grief-stricken mother (“Rabbit Hole”), a terminally ill cabaret performer cum courtesan (“Moulin Rouge!”), a manipulative weather girl (“To Die For”) and a beleaguered mom dealing with supernatural forces (“The Others”).
As Queen of Hollywood-turned-Princess of Monaco in Olivier Dahan’s “Grace of Monaco,” Kidman is truly a sight to behold. She’s a princess in search of a fairy-tale ending—but, therein lies the rub: While Kidman manages to physicalize Grace Kelly’s stellar charisma and regal bearing, the 47-year-old actress fails to capture Kelly’s essence.
KIDMAN. Spritely attitude and liberal ideas
The film is compromised by its awkward dramatization and execution of themes. For the most part, Kidman looks like an actress trying to squeeze believable emotions out of her enigmatic character, who is having a difficult time adjusting to her new role in her stilted, new surroundings in the Mediterranean.
Royal couple
Worse, not once do we feel that the royal couple truly cares for each other: Kidman fails to “connect” with Tim Roth—and vice versa—as much as with Grace Kelly herself—but, let’s not get ahead of ourselves:
Grace Kelly starred in “only” 14 movies—among them “To Catch A Thief,” “High Society,” “Rear Window” and “The Country Girl” (for which she won an Oscar)—over a span of five years. Then, she retired from acting to marry Prince Rainier III (Roth) in 1956 at the age of 26.
Do blushing brides really ride happily into the sunset after a dashing prince whisks them off to the altar? Not necessarily. The movie isn’t really a biopic, and chooses to zero in on the marital and identity crises that Kelly goes through when Rainier figures in a tax-related dispute with France’s Charles de Gaulle in 1962.
Contrary to the fairy-tale stories we’ve read about the couple, the opinionated and independent-minded princess, the movie suggests, wasn’t all that happy at home—because her spritely attitude and liberal ideas weren’t a snug fit for the palace’s outdated protocols, and Monaco’s conservative customs.
Grace’s struggle comes to a head eight years later, when Alfred Hitchcock offers her the title role in 1964’s “Marnie.” And, all hell breaks loose when the press gets wind of the princess’ interest in the role—and the possibility of a splashy return to Tinseltown!
Will the lovely actress-turned-princess find a way to get the Happily-Ever-After she craves?