Amazing Grace?

I've always felt bio-pics were a bit tricky. Actors and actresses who take on the task of having to portray famous people have to not only convincingly perform complex emotional characters, but they also have to project the image of the historical figure that we all expect. If Daniel Day Lewis wants to play Lincoln, he has to have a beard, a stovepipe hat, and a mole.

When the bio-pic is about a famous entertainer- it becomes even more difficult as the image shown to the world is so precise- with film footage and recordings of stars all over Youtube to constantly remind us what these people walk and talk and act like.  So an actor is forced into the daunting task of mimicking that image convincingly while at the same time trying to dig beneath the mask to portray the "real" person. Even when you have a good subject and a great actor, bio-pics about movie stars are really tough. Just ask Faye Dunaway. But what happens when the star you are portraying doesn't have memorably distinct characteristics?

Case in point- Grace of Monaco (2014) the Nicole Kidman starrer about Hollywood fairy-tale princess, Grace Kelly. I can go on and on about how this film was doomed from the start with a script that the Grimaldis themselves considered historically inaccurate and a production history that ended with Harvey Weinstein and director Olivier Dahan publicly feuding over cuts to the film. All this resulted in its being swept under the rug with a limited US release and no awards season love.

Maybe in some previous draft the political intrigue and Kelly's shining moment as a rescuer of her adopted country made sense- but the version I saw created about the same amount of drama as a PTA meeting... with better gowns. The stakes of Monaco possibly being invaded by France seemed inflated- and one speech from a beautiful Hollywood actress seemed insufficient to quell that disaster if we were to buy into it in the first place.

But I have a bigger issue than just poor story structure and historical inaccuracy. I know who Grace Kelly is. I love a couple of her movies and know all about her story as a "top drawer" Philadelphia girl who went to New York to model and act, and then wound-up in Hollywood as one of Hitchcock's favorite chilly blondes. From there she met a real-life Prince, and married him. The fairy tale angle was all the rage and her wedding footage and pictures were broadcast around the world. The Hollywood Princess left America and moved to her adopted home of Monaco where she would reign until her untimely death in a car accident in 1982. But what I didn't realize until I watched Grace of Monaco was that Grace Kelly is a bit of a blank for me.

I looked at Kidman as Kelly. My first thought was, "Oh- she doesn't not look like her. But then I can't be certain she does look like her..." I realized at that moment that while I could definitely pick Grace Kelly out of a line-up, her looks themselves were not necessarily iconic. She was blonde and beautiful, but I was struggling to recall anything distinctive about her look. I thought of her in High Noon (1952), Rear Window (1954), Dial 'M' for Murder (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955) and what I kept seeing were costumes or a hairstyle- not a face. Grace Kelly was beautiful- no question. But her image is not one that sticks in the mind like other Hollywood beauties ala Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, or Elizabeth Taylor.

So then I listened to Kidman and paid attention to her performance. I found myself thinking, "Is this woman I'm seeing Grace Kelly- or just Nicole Kidman moping around the palace?" And again, I was stumped. I couldn't remember how Grace Kelly acted.

Her Hitchcock performances usually involved playing a well-bred woman itching to throw-off the wrap of convention by climbing a fire escape or speeding-off in a fast car. But her rebellion did not involve the emotional explosions that cemented actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, or Susan Hayward into our collective unconscious.

Grace Kelly was great at playing roles that required glamour, poise, and understatement- so it's hard to find the mannerisms or ticks that would make her definitive. There's nothing specific in her acting that makes me say, "Ah! That's Grace Kelly!" Can you imagine RuPaul tasking one of his neophyte queens with, "Give me Grace Kelly realness!"? They might throw on a pair of sunglasses and a scarf and pretend to drive off a cliff- but in lieu of that- what would they do that would read unmistakable Grace Kelly?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I love Grace Kelly. She was a good actress who starred in some memorable movies- but her glamorous look and persona alone are not distinctive enough to be the central focus of a bio-pic. No actress is going to be able to pull off that essential bio-pic thrill of walking onto the screen and making the audience gasp, "That's so-and-so!"

I'm not saying that you can only make bio-pics about iconic entertainers like Marilyn Monroe, Kate Hepburn, and Edith Piaf. But if you're going to make a Grace Kelly bio-pic you have to focus on the most dramatically rich part of her story- that day an American movie star gave up her film career and married a wealthy prince. That's what Grace of Monaco should have done- but they didn't.

File it under "If They'd Only Listened to Lance..."