As someone with the utmost aversion to body shaming and Hollywood beauty ideals, this is a hard one to frame but it has to be acknowledged that if you undertake to portray one of the most mesmerising beauties in all of film history, then certain expectations exist. One of them is not that a 33-year-old Grace Kelly will be portrayed by a middle-aged woman whose waxen death mask of a face has been paralysed into an approximation of youth. It’s unfair, but everything else hinges on the fact that if Kidman had dazzled, the rest of the film’s flaws would seem more forgivable. Instead her taut features fascinate, but in a distracting, Siamese-twin-foetus-in-a-jar kind of way.
Her face is just the tip of a piss-filled iceberg. This melodrama takes historical events and reduces them to daytime soap opera. Not unexpected given we’re talking about one of the grandest Hollywood fairy tales of all time, but in this alternate timeline, the American Princess Grace of Monaco is solely responsible for saving sovereign state Monaco from French annexation, and presumably certain death for its citizens.
Key characters such as French president Charles de Gaulle (Andre Penvern), Aristotle Onassis (Robert Lindsay) and Kelly’s Rear Window and To Catch a Thief director Alfred Hitchcock (Roger Ashton-Griffiths) are reduced to embarrassing caricatures. The casting seems based solely on who sounds most like an olde-timey cartoon villain. One solitary star will be awarded for the metric tonne of amazing jewellery adorning her Serene Highness and guests’ necks – the cold rocks draped around Kidman’s person emote more convincingly than she does.
