The troubled Nicole Kidman royal biopic “Grace of Monaco” was jeered with scathing reviews ahead of its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival Wednesday night.
“Is it even possible to make a boring film out this rich, juicy, gossipy material? It would seem so,” wrote a critic for the Hollywood Reporter. He called it “a stiff, stagey, thuddingly earnest affair which has generated far more drama off screen than on.”
The Telegraph’s reviewer reported that international critics at a morning screening preceding the red-carpet premiere “even by the end of the first scene had started curling up, like startled armadillos, into tight little balls of embarrassment.”
“Not so much a turkey as a dodo, ‘Grace of Monaco’ never takes flight and extinction is probably the best course for it,” writes the reviewer for the Times of London. “Poor Nicole Kidman does her best as actress-turned-princess Grace Kelly, but suffers from the shortcomings of a risible plot and dialogue lost in translation.”
Said Variety: “If Princess Grace was the great role of Kelly’s career, the same can’t be said for Kidman, who would seem to be perfectly cast as the carefully vetted wife trapped in a loveless A-list marriage” — an unmistakable dig at the actress’ former marriage to Tom Cruise.
The one-star review in Guardian proclaimed it even worse than last year’s “horrendous” flop biopic of Princess Diana starring Naomi Watts — and also ran a photo spread unfavorably comparing the film’s fashions to those worn by the real Princess Grace.
Empire Magazine said the film “is often side-splittingly funny . . . the trouble is, it’s not actually meant to be funny.”
Meanwhile, Variety reported that a new deal has been reached for the Weinstein Co. to release the film in later summer or early this fall — but at a heavily discounted fee of $2 million. That’s reportedly $3 million less than the original deal with the film’s French producers, though there will now be “incentives built in based on box-office performance.”
The trade publication had earlier reported that Harvey Weinstein, who has postponed the film’s US release twice, disliked director Olivier Dahan’s movie — and prepared his own version, which Dahan publicly condemned.
Weinstein will not be at Wednesday night’s premiere — the Hollywood Reporter quoted him as saying he’s on a “long-planned” trip to refugee camps in the Middle East.
“I’m wishing Olivier, Nicole [and] the ‘Grace of Monaco’ team all the best for the screening in Cannes tonight,” the mogul said.
At the film’s press conference, director Dahan said: “I wanted to make a film about cinema — it’s all about an actress. It’s not a biopic, even if it’s all true.”
The film’s accuracy has been questioned by Princess Grace’s children and other members of the Monaco royal family, who are boycotting the premiere.