Cannes review: Grace of Monaco

Critics can’t decide if Grace of Monaco is stagey or stiff, wooden or cardboard. But, the majority agree, it’s royally bad.

Olivier Dahan’s film, which opened the Cannes film festival on Wednesday and opens in the UAE on Thursday, stars Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly, escaping Hollywood to marry the handsome Prince Rainier of Monaco (Tim Roth). Monaco refuses to tax its billionaires and send the proceeds to Paris, so the plucky principality is blockaded. It’s up to Grace to princess-up, learn the political game and save the day.

It’s glitzy and empty, so wooden it’s a fire-risk, says the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw in a review that tramples Dahan’s tiara into a fine gold dust. “The cringe-factor is ionospherically high,” he says. “A fleet of ambulances may have to be stationed outside the Palais to take tuxed audiences to hospital to have their toes uncurled.”

Bradshaw’s disdain is shared by Robbie Collin at The Telegraph. Like Bradshaw, he draws comparisons with Naomi Watt’s turn as Diana in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s eponymous biopic of last year. Grace of Monaco is “fantastically silly”, says Collin: “Dahan searches frantically for emotional potency in Kidman, often moving the camera so close to her face you worry the lens hood might bump her forehead.”

The film has been called “a farce” by Kelly’s children Prince Albert and Princess Caroline, while a grand spat between Dahan and his US distributor, Harvey Weinstein, thrilled many critics more than the film. The row, during which Dahan called Weinstein’s unreleased edit “a pile of [expletive]”, was far more entertaining than anything happening on-screen, said Variety’s Scott Foundas. “Kidman never appears to fully connect with the character,” he says. “[She] delivers a series of doleful little-girl-lost-poses — and, later, pantomimed iron-jawed determination.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Dalton sides with Foundas: “Is it even possible to make a boring film out of this rich, juicy gossipy material?” he asks. “It would seem so. Indeed, it is almost perversely impressive how Dahan misses almost every target.”

Grace of Monaco opens with a quote from Kelly: “The idea of my life as a fairytale is itself a fairytale.” In today’s fairytale the film is the damsel in distress, the critics the big, bad wolf, but there’s one knight in shining armour out-there. Here, galloping over the hills, he comes: Geoffrey Macnab, our dashing hero from The Independent. The film is “a subtle and stylised character study”, “an old fashioned weepy in which Kidman excels” and finally, “a film of considerable formal sophistication”.

Macnab’s gallantry might offer some small solace to Dahan, while the rest of the critics growl.