‘Grace of Monaco’ was the worst movie to ever open the Cannes Film Festival
It’s usually treacherous to speak in absolute terms, especially about movies, but when it comes to the worst film to open Cannes, it’s difficult to alight on more than one conclusion.
Over the years, the festival has kicked off with a wide range of titles, from lavish Hollywood classics like Gone with the Wind and Ben-Hur to electrifying documentaries like Gimme Shelter to a host of French cinema showcases like Ma saison préférée and, more recently, La Vénus Électrique. There have also been plenty of blockbuster misfires, like Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood.
Of all of these movies, however, none has quite sunk to the depths of 2014’s opening dud, Grace of Monaco. On the face of it, Cannes was the perfect venue for this heavily fictionalised biopic based on the early years of the marriage between Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. The two met when the actor went to France to attend the festival in 1955, after all, and what could be more in keeping with the out-of-touch glamour of Cannes than a film that shallowly recreates the glamour of an overly funded 1960s monarchy?
Directed by Olivier Dahan, whose biopic of Edith Piaf won two Oscars in 2008, Grace of Monaco begins with the end of Kelly’s Hollywood career and spends an endless amount of time re-litigating the spat between France and Monaco over the latter’s tax haven status. Grace is torn between returning to movies with the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Marnie and earning the respect of the Monégasque riffraff by charming Charles de Gaulle.
At the heart of it all is the conflict of whether the newly minted princess can ensure that eye-wateringly rich businessmen can continue to evade taxes. Spoiler alert: she can. It’s a touching David and Goliath story in which both David and Goliath are obscenely wealthy. Even if the execution was faultless, it would be difficult to make an audience care.
The execution is not faultless. For one thing, Nicole Kidman looks exactly like Nicole Kidman, which isn’t normally an issue when she’s playing a made-up character but is a grating distraction when she’s playing one of the most famous actors to ever grace the big screen. They resorted to giving her an ill-fitting prosthetic nose to play Virginia Woolf in The Hours, even though, presumably, many members of the film-going public would not have heard of the author, let alone seen a picture of her. The least they could do was something equally tasteless for Grace of Monaco.
Everything about the movie is painfully inert. From the Tesco Mobile hold music that it uses as a soundtrack to the golden colour palette that looks like a 2013 Instagram filter, it is shallow on every level. I paused the movie at one point (it’s hard to get through it in one sitting despite the modest 102-minute runtime), and when I returned, I thought that I’d stopped it in the middle of a low-budget ad for an overseas resort. The script, too, is baffling, force-feeding us empty political platitudes to make Grace seem ahead of her time while inadvertently painting her as woefully out of touch and generic. “Colonialism is so last century,” she tells billionaire Aristotle Onassis while cavorting on his yacht.
Throughout it all, Kidman’s facial expressions are contained to the quadrant below her nose, and no matter how much unbearable anguish her character goes through (a backstabbing sister-in-law, a breach of royal etiquette when she bends down to pick up a piece of paper, a mother who calls occasionally but doesn’t mail letters), her face remains unnaturally immobile. I do not want to get sidetracked into a tirade about Botox, but from what I gather, even princesses did not have access to it in 1962, and the anachronism alone is irritating.
The kindest thing that can be said about the film is that it didn’t resort to cheap exploitation of its subject, the way Andrew Dominik did with his Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, but viciously attacking and dehumanising a real person who is no longer alive to defend themselves is a low bar indeed. The real mystery about Grace of Monaco is how it managed to earn the opening slot at Cannes.
Whatever behind-the-scenes machinations that went on beforehand would almost certainly make a better movie than whatever this is.
