by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a more-or-less “original” movie on
Lifetime, one that had a singularly star-crossed journey on its way to an
audience: Grace of Monaco, a 2011
theatrical film which never got shown theatrically, at least in the U.S.,
because director Olivier Dahan and producer Harvey Weinstein got into an
artistic hissy-fit about it and Dahan refused to allow the film to be released
in Weinstein’s cut. The title suggests a biopic about Grace Kelly (Nicole
Kidman — ironically, a far better and more sophisticated actress than the real
one she was playing!) and her abandonment of Hollywood stardom for a real-life
Cinderella story, marrying Prince Rainier of Monaco (Tim Roth) — whom she
rather disconcertingly calls by the nickname “Ray” — and settling in there for
a life that seemed to consist of nothing else than waving from palace windows,
making public appearances at grand balls and bearing him two children, Princess
Caroline (Candela Cottis) and Prince Albert (Roméo Mestanza). The film actually
focuses on only about a year or so in Grace’s life, 1961, when Alfred Hitchcock
(Roger Ashton-Griffiths) arrived in the principality bearing a script for the
film Marnie to offer it to Grace
as a comeback role. (The copy of the script we see bears the name of Jay
Presson Allen as the screenwriter, but that’s an error; the version of Marnie Grace Kelly Grimaldi got offered was an earlier one
adapted by Evan Hunter, and Allen came on board only after Grace turned it down
and Hitchcock tapped ‘Tippi’ Hedren for the role.) Grace Kelly’s potential
return to the screen was ballyhooed worldwide, but it never took place; the
version I’d heard before this movie — the one in John Russell Taylor’s
biography of Hitchcock — was that someone in Monaco read Winston Graham’s novel
Marnie, on which the film was
based, and decided it was inappropriate for the wife of the reigning monarch of
Monaco to make a movie in which she would play a kleptomaniac who was frigid
with men until her husband and a therapist (two separate characters in the
novel but combined into one for the film) figured out how to cure her. So he
launched a public referendum, the citizens of Monaco voted overwhelmingly against Grace Kelly’s return to the screen in such a role,
and though the referendum was non-binding she acceded to the people’s wishes
and never again sought an acting career.
The version told by Arash Amel in the
script for Grace of Monaco is
considerably darker and more convoluted than that, and the real villain of the piece is French president Charles de
Gaulle (André Penvem). It seems that de Gaulle, already in the middle of public
controversy over the French army’s attempt to keep Algeria a French colony (de
Gaulle got dumped on by French anti-imperialists by trying to keep Algeria by
force and then, when he agreed to its independence, got dumped on and nearly
assassinated — an event that’s a key plot point in Amel’s script — by
Right-wingers who didn’t want to see France lose yet another of its overseas
colonies), decided to go after Monaco because a lot of French companies were
dissolving their French corporations and reincorporating in Monaco since it had
neither a personal nor a business income tax. (The more things change … ) At
least according to this script — not being particularly “up” on recent
Monegasque history, I have no idea whether this was true — de Gaulle served
notice on the Monaco government that they must not only impose personal and
business income taxes but turn over all the revenue from them to France, or
else France would impose economic sanctions on Monaco (which, given that virtually
everything Monaco needed came to it via France, would quickly cripple their
economy) and mass French troops on the border for a takeover. Our Heroine is
naturally aghast about this, but the French propagandists use the fact that
she’s considering playing a kleptomaniac for Alfred Hitchcock as one of the
reasons they claim Monaco is being governed by irresponsible people and the
French need to take over for the Monegasques’ own good. Grace of
Monaco has a promising opening — Hitchcock
arrives to deliver Grace the script for Marnie and her lady-in-waiting gives him a long and pompous
list of protocols he is to follow when they meet, only as soon as he enters her
room she says, “Hitch!,” greeting the director of her three greatest films as
the old and dear friend he in fact was and showing a total lack of formality —
and the first half-hour or so is marvelously entertaining, but the dizzying
array of plots and counter-plots, leading to the disgrace of Rainier’s sister
Antoinette (Geraldine Somerville), and the long scenes between Grace and her
confidant, Father Francis Tucker (Frank Langella), who appears to have been the
priest who married her and Rainier, eventually become quite boring.
Grace
realizes that the only way she can save Monaco’s independence — earlier she’d
attempted to goose up Rainier’s morale by pointing out to him that both Louis
XIV and Napoleon had tried to conquer Monaco, and she wasn’t about to let de
Gaulle succeed where they had failed— is to go through with the Monaco Red
Cross’s annual charity ball, even though earlier on she’d tried to get the Red
Cross to abandon the ball and instead come up with more funding for an
appallingly dirty and ill-kept children’s hospital. Accordingly she hosts the
ball, invites de Gaulle to attend, and in his presence makes a stirring speech
defending Monaco’s independence, which eventually gets de Gaulle to back off
his threats. The movie is also remarkable for including Aristotle Onassis
(Robert Lindsay) and Maria Callas (Paz Vega — beautifully made up to look
uncannily like the real one) in the dramatis personae — Onassis was Monaco’s biggest private investor
until he and the Grimaldis had a bitter falling-out and he pulled his interests
out of there — though all Paz Vega gets to do is perform at the big ball,
lip-synching to the recording of “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s Gianni
Schicchi made by the real Callas in 1954. Grace of Monaco had an ill-starred development and release history,
winning a position on the 2011 “Blacklist” (a recent phenomenon in which an
organization gives prizes for the best unproduced screenplays floating around
Hollywood in hopes some enterprising producer will buy and make them) and being
completed and shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012. Harvey Weinstein
bought distribution rights but then wanted director Olivier Dahan to re-edit
the film for a 2013 U.S. release. When Weinstein and Dahan couldn’t agree on a
version of the film to release, Weinstein gave up any hope of a theatrical
release and dumped it on Lifetime instead, where it was heavily promoted (after
all, it isn’t every day that Lifetime gets to show a movie with an “A”-list
star like Kidman in a role that, despite the longueurs in Amel’s screenplay, is a virtual tour de
force for her) but came off as merely a
somewhat better version of their usual sludge.
