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No Saving 'Grace' in Contrived Melodrama
The offscreen palace intrigue between "Grace of Monaco" director Olivier Dahan and his on-again off-again U.S. distributor Harvey Weinstein turns out to be far livelier than anything onscreen in Dahan's cardboard and frequently cornball melodrama about Grace Kelly's bumpy transition from Hollywood to actual princess - and her (seemingly single-handed) saving of her embattled sovereign state from French annexation. Handsomely produced but as dramatically inert as star Nicole Kidman's frigid cheek muscles, Dahan's strained bid to recapture the critical and commercial success of his smash Edith Piaf biopic "La Vie en Rose" is the sort of misbegotten venture no amount of clever re-editing could hope to improve. The decision to release the pic in France and other key Euro territories immediately following its opening-night Cannes berth reps a healthy gamble on Kidman's drawing power against the summer blockbuster deluge.
Although Dahan and screenwriter Arash Amel open "Grace" with a quote by Kelly herself stating that "the idea of my life as a fairy tale is itself a fairy tale," the movie that follows very much tries to have things both ways, with a script that feels cobbled together equally from "Cinderella," "My Fair Lady" and "The King's Speech," culminating in - what else? - a lavish ball. In between, "Grace" offers a vision of the Philadelphia-born Oscar winner as not exactly an ugly duckling, but certainly a gauche American unschooled in the manners and mores of the European aristocracy, and very much an outsider in her own sovereign state,...