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Review: ‘Grace of Monaco,’ a Fractured Fairy Tale on Lifetime

By ALESSANDRA STANLEYMAY 24, 2015

Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly in “Grace of Monaco,” directed by Olivier Dahan.CreditDavid Koskas/Weinstein Company

“Grace of Monaco” is a Lifetime movie, showing on Monday, that stars Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly in a not-so-happily-ever-after stage. It’s not good, of course, but it is kind of great, almost irresistible. This is a star-studded, lavishly made drama that falls into that special niche: If it were any better, it would be worse.

It begins in 1962, at a particularly strained time in Princess Grace’s rocky marriage to Prince Rainier, six years after their wedding of the century. Stifled by palace life, this princess wants to return to Hollywood and star in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie.” Rainier (Tim Roth) thinks it will make him look bad if his wife kisses another man on screen. As their dispute simmers, a geopolitical crisis erupts that tests the marriage and the mettle of Monaco.

“Grace of Monaco” opened the Cannes Film Festival last year and was greeted with derisive laughter. Olivier Dahan, whose 2007 film, “La Vie en Rose,” won Marion Cotillard an Oscar for best actress, directed the film as a homage to Hitchcock. The screenplay follows the formula of Peter Morgan, who wrote “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon,” works that put famous people in collision with one another at a pivotal moment in history.

And accordingly, “Grace of Monaco” wildly inflates a 1962 tax dispute between France and Monaco into a showdown as big as the Cuban missile crisis. In this imagining, the French president, Charles de Gaulle, puts Monaco under siege, blockading the borders and threatening to send in tanks. (One of the worst things that happened to Monaco was that the French postal service applied the international rates to Monaco’s stamps, doubling the price of a postcard.)

In the film, democracy is in peril. The impending invasion rouses the Philadelphia-bred princess to lead Monaco’s fight for liberty from French tyranny and exploitation. Actually, she’s fighting for her country’s right to encourage French businesses to register in Monaco, a tax-free zone, in order to escape French taxes — all representation and no taxation.

Then there is the homage thing. Parker Posey plays Madge, a sinister palace aide who wears only black and reprovingly corrects the princess’s faux pas like a Mediterranean resort version of Mrs. Danvers in the Hitchcock classic “Rebecca.”

Lush orchestral music evokes the themes to “Vertigo” and “Suspicion,” a black rotary phone rings as ominously as the one in “Sorry, Wrong Number,” and Princess Grace drives a light-blue convertible at breakneck speed along a curvy corniche like the one that the actress drove with Cary Grant in “To Catch a Thief.”

Lifetime will also show “The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe,” with Kelli Garner as that doomed movie star. A painstaking two-part biography, on Saturday and Sunday, that is far worse than “Grace of Monaco,” the film chronicles Marilyn Monroe’s hidden relationship with her mentally ill mother, played by Susan Sarandon. It’s plodding, morose and, unlike Monroe’s real life, endless.

Hollywood keeps trying to replicate famous beauties like Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe, screen goddesses who are memorable because they were inimitable. Studios are tempted by the mystique and the name recognition, and actresses seem to want more than just an acting challenge — there must be some primitive urge to fuse themselves with these immortals and siphon some of their allure.

Ms. Kidman is not bad as Grace Kelly; she just isn’t Grace Kelly. She is lovely, the hair, makeup and costumes are excellent, but the actress works so hard to recreate the movie star’s voice, mien and magic that the distance is only magnified. Hitchcock and the camera loved her fire-and-ice blend of purity and sensuality. This Grace Kelly is mostly ice.

The plot, however, is enjoyably overheated. The Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis (Robert Lindsay) is a wily consigliere to Rainier, and his parties with Maria Callas (Paz Vega) on his gigantic yacht are wild and vulgar, only darkening the mood of the French treasury officials in town to bully Rainier into accepting their terms. When a patronizing French envoy lectures Princess Grace about France’s war in Algeria, she retorts, “Oh, but colonialism is so last century.”

Frank Langella is Francis Tucker, a worldly priest who humors Princess Grace much the way the Soviet spymaster he plays on “The Americans” handles his undercover agents. Here, though, he takes orders from the Vatican, not Moscow. Derek Jacobi plays a mincing etiquette master hired to school the princess in the royal graces. Mr. Roth is really quite good as a debonair, irresolute but not clueless Rainier, heir to the Grimaldi royal family, which dates to the 13th century.

And de Gaulle (André Penvern) is a hoot. When Princess Grace invites him to her Red Cross ball, his ministers smell a trap. “I survived an assassination attempt,” de Gaulle tells them. “I am not afraid of an actress.”

“Grace of Monaco” debunks the fairy-tale ending of Princess Grace and her charming prince to create its own fairy tale, only this one is more like “The Mouse That Roared.”