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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Cannes 2014: Grace of Monaco

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Olivier Dahan is inarguably a genius. He is also, perhaps less clearly, a madman.

I was expecting to tweet, perhaps Vine, a quick reaction to Grace of Monaco, but the film defied my urge to a quick, clean reaction. It is glorious, magical, inspired… and missing… something. But I have a powerful urge to revisit it – which my afternoon schedule unfortunately disallows, for now – to try to get a better handle on it.

The premise starts out blurry and comes into focus as the story develops. While watching the early scenes, I found myself giddily looking forward to the plunge off the side of the road, an inevitable mixture of high camp and advertising level photography. But while it is repeatedly foreshadowed, he moment never arrives… and by the middle of the 2nd act, I was no longer looking forward to it. Dahan starts out with hyperbolized Sirk, mixed liberally with Hitchcock (who owns the 2nd act and the entire score), and slowly tones it down, perhaps even underplaying the melodrama while still maintaining the visual style.

The question about the film for me, is whether the equation really adds up. But the pieces along the way are pretty glorious.

Nicole Kidman gives one of her best performances here. She has been pushing away from her movie star tricks for the last couple of years and this role really demands layers of self-awareness that are heretofore unseen in her roles. She’s been playing rawness lately, chasing more natural performances, but this is a role that doesn’t allow that freedom. Kidman’s Grace is almost always performing on some level.

And in the few moments of raw vulnerability, Dahan likes to shove the camera right in Kidman’s face, not only in close-up, but cutting the top and bottom of her face. We can see the veins in her eyes and the (tiny) pores in her skin. Yet, as with so much of the performance, Kidman’s stillness pulls us in.

The running gag about Kidman (which I always felt was wildly overstated) was that Botox had ruined her acting. Watching these close-ups, I almost felt as though Dahan was telling Kidman’s critics to fuck off and watch her act with her eyes alone.

Great supporting cast. Tim Roth has an unforgiving role, but I still loved watching him. Robert Lindsay was nearly unrecognizable and great as Ari Onassis, begging the question of why the great movie about Onassis has never been made. Paz Vega is a surprise as Maria Callas. Roger Ashton Griffiths does the best on-camera Hitchcock ever. Seriously. Never seems to be working for a second. Dead on. Gotta love Parker Posey working with a dry stick right up her ass. Derek Jacobi doing the aging queen of grace is a tickle. And Langella is both perfect and effortlessly purring as the father confessor.

But this movie is, in the end, all Dahan and Kidman. For better and worse.

By the end, I got it. All in. But it took half a movie to get me there. Is that a flaw or a virtue?

Likewise, having not seen the rest of the footage, I have no idea if Harvey Weinstein is right or being an ass. The movie is only 1:40, so it’s not a length issue. And I’m not sure it can be “fixed” because Dahan’s style is so idiosyncratic. Or that it needs to be fixed.

Besides faces, just the level of Dahan’s taste and skill is in evidence in scene after scene. Obviously, he has collaborators who are also adding and are skilled (like editor Oliver Gajan)… but some of the cutting is so well designed that you have to assume it was shot to cut that way.

Anyway… I have a feeling that this film will “improve” with time. Could be wrong. But I walked out of the first screening of Cannes 2014 feeling like I’d been presented with a real movie. And I was happy.

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4 Responses to “Cannes 2014: Grace of Monaco”

  1. spacesheik says:

    David, I have not seen the film but it has just opened in the Gulf. Its around 99 minutes or so, so I think that’s the final international version.

    Here’s a link.

  2. Daniella Isaacs says:

    First, hearing it was a disaster followed by your intriguing comments makes me really want to see it. A lot of “disasters” are more interesting than universally applauded “hits.”

  3. SamLowry says:

    “…watch her act with her eyes alone.”

    So she has to act with her eyes because she can’t move her facial muscles anymore?

  4. Breedlove says:

    Dave, I’m amazed that you would say the Botox was never a big issue. Maybe living in L.A. you get used to that look. Terrible decision on her part that made her look noticeably worse and has been very distracting and off-putting in multiple movies. She’s had the fish lips in some movies too…amazes me that people who’ve been watching her in films since she was 20 could see her with the fish lips and alien face on a giant screen and not be put off or distracted at all.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon