Grace of Monaco ** (2014, Nicole Kidman, Tim Roth) – Movie Review

Grace of Monaco is not devoid of interest but it is a drab mess, with an oddly blank Nicole Kidman and a weirdly brooding Tim Roth both hopelessly miscast both as physical and character types as Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier. They carry on regardless, as the true professionals they are, and command respect and attention. There are a few signs in a few of the scenes, that in a different film, as different characters, with different strong support players they could have been electric.

But alas, they’re backed up a series of naff performances. Derek Jacobi’s is the worst among them as the camp old Count Fernando D’Aillieres, though Frank Langella is pretty ripe as Father Francis Tucker and Robert Lindsay is feeble as Aristotle Onassis, while Parker Posey is overplaying her Mrs Danvers act as Madge Tivey-Faucon and Paz Vega is no good at all, entirely ineffective as Maria Callas. Odd how Onassis and Callas just happen to be around at key moments in the story. Didn’t they have some shipping and opera business to take care of? These are all good actors having a bit of a bad day.

Arash Amel’s forlorn and misjudged screenplay concentrates not, as we’d all like, on movie star Grace Kelly’s abdication from Hollywood or her love affair with Monaco’s Prince Rainier III or her fatal car crash, but instead on her far less interesting crisis of marriage and identity, and Monaco’s political dispute with France’s Charles De Gaulle (played by André Penvern, another non-lookalike), which threatened a French invasion of the tax-free principality in the early 1960s.

Rainier is portrayed as a sullen, difficult ditherer, not above being unpleasant to his wife, so the screenplay is never clear why its Grace left Hollywood for good, went to Monaco, became its princess or returned to the idea of supporting Rainier and loving him. Roth makes him seem unloveable. Kidman doesn’t make Grace too sympathetic either, but maybe that’s a good thing as far as the film is concerned.

In its favour, Grace of Monaco is a well-dressed, handsome-looking movie, more fun as an escapist soap than as the intense political in-fighting saga it goes for. Kidman even looks like Kelly occasionally, in the way of Helen Mirren as the Queen, although Kidman’s 20 years older than her predecessor when this movie unfolds and in real life looks absolutely nothing like her.

Also in its favour, it presents Alfred Hitchcock in a good light, with the director shown as good-humoured and good natured, and loving Grace Kelly and caring for her, even wishing her well when she finally bails out of his movie Marnie (with that new Scottish actor). And, even if Roger Ashton-Griffiths’s impersonation isn’t the best ever, his little bit is good fun, and about the best the movie has to offer.

Grace Kelly of course did star in Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief for Hitchcock before she quit Hollywood.

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(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/