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.

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

The Queen (***3/4)

?  Director Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters), whose filmography has delved into seemingly all sides of the class divisions in Britain, depicts the top of the upper crust and how they reacted to the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Helen Mirren, whose previous role was as Elizabeth I in a TV movie, plays the titular Elizabeth II, and Michael Sheen the newly installed prime minister, Tony Blair. The script is by Peter Morgan, whose work is concurrently on view in The Last King of Scotland.

+  For the crown, the death of Diana represented an unprecedented quandary. Having divorced Prince Charles, she was no longer, technically, a royal. Nor were Elizabeth and, especially, her imperious husband Phillip, inclined to celebrate the life of someone they’d come to regard most uncharitably. Instead, they holed up in their country estate. The contrast between the young prime minister and the aging queen mirrors the gulf between the royals’ and the public’s view of the crown’s role in the age of celebrity. In other words, the people expected a gesture of grief to mirror theirs. I’ve never understood myself why an accident of birth should make someone worthy of all that attention, which put me in the odd position of relating, in this case, to the queen’s stance. Yet if I can’t say Frears made me

understand the depth of feeling engendered by the martyred princess, he does make it palpable. Mixing real footage with the fictional helps convey the genuine sadness felt by millions.

   Of course, a great deal attention will deservedly focus on Mirren, whose Elizabeth is a believable mix of the earthy (she drives her own Range Rover) and the reserved. Sheen is a pretty effective Blair, although in his earliest scene, meeting the queen, he seems such a Pee Wee Herman-esque pipsqueak that it seemed hard to believe this was a man who’d just won a landslide victory. Nonetheless, the movie winds up as a mash note to an emerging statesman, with only the queen’s comment in the epilogue alluding to Blair’s now-sullied reputation.

 - Just once or twice I thought the movie was slow as it inexorably leads toward the self-abnegation by the monarch.

= ***1/2 Not quite a political film, not quite a biographical one, this is a blend of character drama and cultural history lesson that made me interested in an episode I’d utterly ignored when it happened.

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