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Stumbling Upon A Teenage 'Princess'
submitted by: Lisa D.
source: New York Newsday
Date: August 3, 2001
by Jan Stuart, Staff Writer
(2 1/2 STARS) THE PRINCESS DIARIES. (G) Prim European queen Julie Andrews teaches clumsy American granddaughter Anne Hathaway how to give the royal wave and other courtly behaviors in a middling contemporary comic fantasy that should be manna for romantically inclined schoolgirls of all ages. Directed by Garry Marshall. 1:50. At area theaters.
WHY DOES IT seem inevitable that if Julie Andrews hung in long enough, she'd eventually get to play Henry Higgins? "The Princess Diaries," a moderately appealing Disney comedy in which Andrews grooms a shlumpy schoolgirl for the thoroughbred demands of high society, is hardly a cross-dressing update of "My Fair Lady." But in its own blanded-down fashion, it captures just enough of that show's metamorphic zest to make you wish it were.
The object of Andrews' tutorial is Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway), a 15-year-old San Franciscan prep- school girl who specializes at fading into the woodwork. We are obliged to suspend oceans of disbelief regarding her self-styled invisibility, as it is evident from Hathaway's first appearance that she is the most alluring young woman on campus. Why can't her classmates see what is so glaringly obvious to the audience? She has frizzy hair and glasses, the eternal cover-girl equivalent to the humped back.
The product of a bohemian-painter dynasty (her mother's parents had "an exhibition at Woodstock," we are also asked to swallow, presumably next to the Country Joe and the Fish installation), she discovers that she is royalty on her late father's side. Enter Queen Clarisse Renaldi (Andrews), Mia's paternal grandmother and ruler of Genovia, a European principality in the fictional mode of Fredonia and the Grand Duchy of Fenwick. Same castle skyline, same sycophantic consulate, only not as funny.
Fans of MTV's "Becoming" appreciate that any red-blooded American teenager will jump through hoops for the chance to imitate some third- rate rock star in an ersatz music video. But Mia strangely balks at the opportunity to be a princess, defending her anonymity and bungling her way like Eliza Doolittle through her grandmother's painstaking etiquette lessons. In place of the Ascot racetrack, we get a laborious coming-out dinner party that is foiled by Mia, who has somehow been shielded from sorbet for most of her life.
Hathaway does the klutz thing well, and "The Princess Diaries" is rarely as wicked fun as when she is batting a softball at her gym teacher's noggin. But Mia's droll lack of muscle coordination only embodies the movie's failures of comic coordination between credible slapstick impulses and preposterous infusions of reality-based humor.
Director Garry Marshall and writer Gina Wendkos keep lobbing "characters" and throwaway lines at us that seem to want to remind us that this is crazy San Francisco, after all (there is an amusing feng shui reference over the school's "M*A*S*H"- like public address system). But for every one that connects ("Welcome to the Dollhouse's" nerd-princess Heather Matarazzo as Mia's neo-activist chum and Larry Miller as an Italian hairdresser) there is another that thuds jarringly (Patrick Richwood's prissy neighbor and Sandra Oh's obsequious vice principal). Mia's schoolyard antagonists are a "Beach Party" picture waiting to happen, and by the last half-hour it does.
Through it all, Julie Andrews manages an engaging feat of balancing royal respectability and Mary Poppins resourcefulness, as only Julie Andrews can. You almost forgive her the Queen's offensive blessing of Mia's straight-haired makeover. A whole new generation of kinky-headed teenage girls will be hauling out Mother's iron to look like Morticia Addams.
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