Grace of Monaco

Early on in this Grace Kelly biopic, Alfred Hitchcock (Roger Ashton-Griffiths) visits Princess Grace (played by Nicole Kidman) to convince her to return to acting for his film Marnie. It’s a lightly-played sequence that takes on a strangely unnerving edge, given that Ashton-Griffiths sounds less like Hitchcock and more like Pinhead from Hellraiser. The Cenobite monsters of that horror series promised sadistic pleasures from the greatest of suffering, and while that prophecy of suffering is apt for Grace of Monaco, Olivier Dahan’s film rarely grants one the courtesy of being enjoyable in its terribleness. There are only specks of camp cheese amid this dish of overwhelming tedium.

A stale Kidman struggles to capture any of Kelly’s magnetism and fails to make her inner workings readable, though the disastrous script and slapdash direction and editing certainly don’t help her or Tim Roth as Prince Rainier. An omnipresent, heavy-handed score is another poor aesthetic choice. Not content to just be extremely weak, the film is also a confused and outright misguided affair, with a regressive view of women, a dubious equation of Monaco’s fight against taxation with the Algerian struggle for independence, and a send-off bit of dialogue that completely contradicts a Kelly quote that opens the film. Kidman’s infamous Chanel No. 5 advert had better clarity of purpose than this.