As a biopic of one of the most famous women in the world, starring Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman and with La Vie en Rose’s Olivier Dahan in the director’s chair, Grace of Monaco was expected to carve out a place as an awards-season contender after it was announced as the opening film of the 2014 Cannes film festival. But following rows over distribution, a spat with the Monégasque royal family and scathing reviews, it has been revealed that the film will receive its belated US debut a year later on the Lifetime channel.
With no North American theatrical bow in sight, Grace of Monaco will be screened on 25 May via the cable channel famed for soapy melodramas and dubious biopics of the likes of Whitney Houston, Aaliyah, Brittany Murphy and Elizabeth Taylor. Dahan’s film centres on the former Grace Kelly’s vital role in helping to avoid a coup in 1962, when Monaco and France were in dispute. Tim Roth plays Prince Rainier, and the cast also features such luminaries as Frank Langella, Derek Jacobi and Parker Posey.
The biopic first ran into trouble when it was denounced by Kelly’s son, Prince Albert of Monaco, and his two sisters as “pure fiction” in January 2013. It later emerged that Hollywood superproducer Harvey Weinstein refused to sanction a North American release without substantial edits, which he thought should give the film a better chance of awards season success.
Dahan was fiercely critical of a version of the biopic reportedly re-edited by Weinstein in October 2013. He labelled it a “pile of shit” and threatened to block to its release, and told Libération: “If I don’t sign, that’s where the out-and-out blackmail starts, but I could go that far. There are two versions of the film for now: mine and his … which I find catastrophic.”
When the film eventually debuted at Cannes, out of competition, it was labelled “awe-inspiringly wooden” by the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who added: “The cringe factor is ionospherically high. A fleet of ambulances may have to be stationed outside the Palais to take tuxed audiences to hospital afterwards to have their toes uncurled under general anaesthetic.”
Critics elsewhere were no kinder, and the film currently holds a rating of nine percent “rotten” on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It did receive a theatrical release in most European countries following its Cannes debut and in fact has so far made around $26.6m (£17.8m) at the global box office, almost recouping a reported $30m production budget.
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