'Princess' is royal flush of humor
Julie Andrews has been here before. Back in the '50s, she played Eliza Doolittle in the classic musical "My Fair Lady," making Broadway history as the lower-class lass who passes as an aristocrat after Professor Henry Higgins teaches her to talk and walk like a lady.
Decades later, "The Princess Diaries" lets Andrews (see interview, page 18) try the Higgins role herself. Here, she plays the queen of Genovia, an itsy-bitsy European principality, who has decided Genovia's next ruler should be her granddaughter, Mia, a San Francisco teenager who's never been told that her long-estranged father had royal blood.
Mia knows little about Europe, and nothing about the tricks of running a country, but the queen is willing to mold her manners, coach her diction, dictate her wardrobe, and do anything needed to make her a proper Old World princess. The job carries plenty of perks - a limo is mighty tempting to a girl whose Mustang can barely make it up a hill - but Mia's a shy type who dreads the spotlight a royal perch would bring. Can her well-meaning grandma put her on the road to monarchy? Or do her Californian values run so deep that Henry Higgins himself couldn't change them?
"The Princess Diaries" unfolds its story from Mia's point of view, aiming at teen viewers who'll identify with her identity crisis and with the everyday details of adolescent life - quarrels with mom, gabfests with friends, rivalries, and romances at school - that the movie convincingly paints. A well-chosen cast helps the picture come alive: Andrews as the queen; Anne Hathaway as her undecided granddaughter; Caroline Goodall as Mia's mom; Hector Elizondo as a royal assistant; Sandra Oh as a long-suffering school principal; and Heather Matarazzo in a perfect performance as Mia's closest pal. Only the boys in Mia's life tend to look like generic teenpic characters.
With its leisurely pace and unfancy filmmaking, "The Princess Diaries" is a likable throwback to an old tradition of pictures from the Disney studio. While most of today's youth-targeted movies unleash bombardments of visual effects and pop-culture distractions, director Garry Marshall spins this yarn with a quiet dignity that Genovia's staid queen would applaud.
The film isn't backward-looking in its attitudes toward modern society, though. Two or three decades ago, Mia would surely have ended the story by refusing her royal opportunity in the name of American values like democracy and individualism. By contrast, the Mia of 2001 decides to grab the job. How else could a middle-class girl get enough influence and power to make the world listen to her ideas?
The movie may have two strikes against it at the box office. One is its too-long running time, stretching what should have been a tightly wound 80-minute tale into almost two hours of ultimately tiring comedy. The other is its G rating. This tag signals suitability for very young viewers, but "Princess" may be too slow and sophisticated for kids under 8 or so, while older teens may find it too tame compared to competing PG and PG-13 fare.
Then again, "The Princess Diaries" may well catch hold, since it's one of the funniest films so far this summer, liberally peppered with jokes and sight gags. You could do a lot worse during this disappointing Hollywood season.
Rated G; contains no objectionable material.
