Diana (***1/4)

If a UK film gets a wide release across the pond, it’s as likely as not that there’s magic or the royal family involved somehow. Or is written by Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually, Bean), whose About Time is opening the same weekend as Diana. The American fascination with British royalty has always escaped me, but it would have been difficult to have lived through the 1980s and '90s and not been aware of the marriage and subsequent divorce of Prince Charles and the Diana Spencer, or of the car crash that killed Diana (Naomi Watts) on August 31, 1997. The movie, based on a book by Kate Snell called Diana: Her Last Love, is about the last two years of her’s life. I assumed that it would be about her relationship with Dodi Fayed, the wealthy Egyptian who died with her. In fact, the “last love” is not Fayed, but Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews, of NBC’s Lost), a Pakistani-born surgeon she met in a London hospital. At the time, Diana had separated from Charles, but not yet divorced.

The story the movie tells is a little like a real-life Notting Hill, the Richard Curtis-penned romantic comedy in which bookstore clerk Hugh Grant romances movie star Julia Roberts. Its best-known line, “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” could have been dialogue for Diana, who is the pursuer in the relationship. Admittedly, such dialogue would be a bit florid for this movie, which is neither comedic nor so overtly romantic. We don’t find out if the Hugh Grant character gets tired of having paparazzi follow his movie-star girlfriend, but Khan has no interest in Diana as a celebrity, or in giving up his privacy. This is the central conflict in the film.

The best thing I can say about the movie is that it also has little interest in Diana as a celebrity. The director is Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made the excellent German films The Experiment and Downfall as well as the 2007 thriller The Invasion. Thus, Diana is worth watching even if you were not especially curious about its title character. The film also handles the death with subtlety, neither showing the accident nor addressing the possible role of the paparazzi in causing it. It does show Diana as having found frequently found the press a nuisance, but also willing to use it for her own purposes, both public (in her campaign to publicize the dangers of land mines) and private. That last bit is the least flattering aspect of the film’s portrayal, but it’s one of the things that makes her a real character, not just a princess. Both Watts and Andrews are a cut above the type of actor you’d have expected to be cast were this a cheesy celebrity biopic.

IMDB link

viewed  10/30/13 7:30 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and posted 11/2/13