Anyway, I’m not so much indignant as confused. Audiences will come out scratching their heads. The movie is half-baked, a shabby job of work. There are flashes of good stuff: a music video in the closing titles, some good songs on the sound track, Lance Crouther heroically making Pootie Tang an intriguing character even though the movie gives him no help. This movie is not in a releasable condition.
Princess Diaries
(DIRECTED BY GARRY MARSHALL; STARRING JULIE ANDREWS, ANNE HATHAWAY; 2001)
Haven’t I seen this movie before? The Princess Diaries is a march through the swamp of recycled ugly duckling stories, with occasional pauses in the marsh of sitcom clichés and the bog of Idiot Plots. You recall the Idiot Plot. That’s the plot that would be solved in an instant if anyone on the screen said what was obvious to the audience. A movie like this isn’t entertainment. It’s more like a party game that you lose if you say the secret word.
The film takes place in the present day, I guess, if through some kind of weird Pleasantville time warp the present day had the values and behavior of Andy Hardy movies. It is about a fifteen-year-old girl who doesn’t realize she’s really the princess of Genovia, which is “between France and Spain” and needs a heir from its royal bloodline if it is not to (a) go out of business, or (b) be taken over by the evil baron and baroness, I’m not sure which. Turns out that Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway) is the daughter of the Prince of Genovia, but has never learned this fact, because her mother, Helen (Caroline Goodall), wanted to lead a normal life and thus left Genovia and her husband, never told Mia about her real father, and raised her normally—i.e., in a San Francisco firehouse where she slides down the pole every morning.
The prince has come to an untimely end, and now his mother comes to recruit Mia to take up her royal duties. The mother is Queen Clarisse Renaldi, played by Julie Andrews as a nice woman with very, very, very good manners. The suspense involves: Will Mia accept the throne? And will she choose as her boyfriend the snobbish jerk Josh (Erik Von Detten) or the nice Michael (Robert Schwartzman), older brother of her best friend, Lilly (Heather Matarazzo)? And, for that matter, is there any possibility that Josh will dump a glamorous cheerleader (Mandy Moore) after he sees how Mia looks once she takes off her glasses and does something with her hair? Anyone who doesn’t immediately know the answers to these questions either lives in a cave, or wrote this screenplay.
The words “Why don’t you do something about your hair?” have inspired movie transformation scenes since time immemorial, but rarely has the transformation been more of a setup than here. Garry Marshall, the director, hasn’t had the nerve to cast a real fifteen-year-old as Mia, but supplies us instead with Anne Hathaway, who is almost twenty-one years old and is a classic beauty in the Daphne Zuniga tradition. We’re expected to believe that this character gets so nervous in class that she throws up while trying to make a speech, and yet the rest of the time is as effortlessly verbal as a stand-up comedian.
One of the creaky problems thrown in the way of the plot is a “scandal” when Mia is photographed in what is not really a very scandalous situation at all, and so perhaps must renounce the throne. Queen Clarisse Renaldi seems reconciled to this. What do you think the chances are that the ruling family of a lucrative tax shelter—Monaco, for example—would abandon their principality because of a newspaper photo of the heir kissing a boy? In the interests of keeping the loot in the family, any heir—even Phoolan Devi, the late Bandit Queen of India—would be considered a viable candidate.
Garry Marshall made the wonderful Pretty Woman, but what was his thinking here? Some of the editing is plain sloppy. We are informed, for example, that when a kiss is magical, one of a girl’s heels curls up off the floor. Cut to a heel curling up, but stuck to a strand of chewing gum. Whose heel? Whose gum? Nobody’s. This is simply an isolated, self-contained shot. Later, at a dinner party, Marshall spends time establishing one of the guests as a drunk, but then the guest disappears without a payoff.
As The Princess Diaries creeps from one painfully obvious plot destination to another, we wait impatiently for the characters onscreen to arrive at what has long been clear to the audience. If the movie is determined to be this dim-witted, couldn’t it at least move a little more quickly? The metronome is set too slow, as if everyone is acting and thinking in half time.
The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
(DIRECTED BY GARRY MARSHALL; STARRING JULIE ANDREWS, ANNE HATHAWAY; 2004)
The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement offers the prudent critic with a choice. He can say what he really thinks about the movie, or he can play it safe by writing that it’s sure to be loved by lots of young girls. But I avoid saying that anything is sure to be loved by anybody.
In this case, I am not a young girl, nor have I ever been, and so how would I know if one would like it? Of course, that’s exactly the objection I get in e-mails from young readers, who complain that no one like me can possibly like a movie like this. They are correct. I have spent a long time, starting at birth and continuing until this very moment, evolving into the kind of person who could not possibly like a movie like this, and I like to think the effort was not in vain.
So to girls who think they might like this movie, I say: Enjoy! Movies are for fun, among other things, and if you love The Princess Diaries 2, then I am happy for you, because I value the movies too much to want anyone to have a bad time at one.
But to Garry Marshall, the often-talented director of the original Princess Diaries as well as this sequel, I say: Did you deliberately assemble this movie from off-the-shelf parts, or did it just happen that way? The film is like an homage to the clichés and obligatory stereotypes of its genre. For someone like Marshall, it must have been like playing the scales.
The beautiful Anne Hathaway, still only twenty-two, stars as Princess Mia. You will remember that she was a typical American teenager whose mother raised her in a converted San Francisco firehouse, where she could slide down the pole every morning. Then a visit from Queen Clarisse of Genovia (Julie Andrews) revealed that she was, in fact, the queen’s granddaughter and next in line to the throne.
In Part 2, she is the beloved Princess Mia of Genovia, a kingdom the size of a movie set, which is apparently located somewhere in Europe and populated by citizens who speak American English, except for a few snaky types with British accents. This kingdom has two peculiarities: (1) The shops and homes all seem to be three-fourth-scale models of the sorts of structures an American Girl doll would occupy; and (2) a great many of the extras get a few extra frames, in order to look uncannily as if they might be personal friends of the director. So many prosperous men in their sixties, so well barbered, groomed, and dressed, so Southern California in their very bearing, are unlikely to be visiting Genovia for any other reason, since the kingdom doesn’t seem to have a golf course.
There’s no need for me to spoil the plot; as I was saying just the other day about The Village, it spoils itself. If I were to describe the characters, you could instantly tell me what happens in the movie. Let’s try that, as an experiment.
There is Princess Mia, who is given a deadline of one month to either marry or forfeit her rights to the throne. The evil Viscount Mabrey (John Rhys-Davies) wants to disqualify her because his nephew, Sir Nicholas (Chris Pine), is next in line to the throne. Desperate for a husband and learning that Queen Clarisse was perfectly happy in an arranged marriage, Mia decides to marry for the love of her country.