Release Date: April 2, 2004
Starring: Julia Stiles, Luke Mably, Ben Miller, James Fox, Miranda Richardson
Directed by: Martha Coolidge
Written by: Katherin Fugate, Jack Amiel, Michael Begler
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG (some sex-related material, language)
The Prince & Me is a contradiction in terms -- a comedy made for teenagers with a Hollywood classicist’s sense of romance. It is the kind of movie, for example, where the guy and the girl meet on a college campus but not at a drunken, tripped-out, sexed-up orgy of a house party. It is a film where the two leads consummate their romance with a deliriously happy kiss, captured by a camera that spins wildly about them. And, yes, there are Europeans with funny accents involved, but the film is wholly respectful of the characters from the other side of the pond. Ultimately, however, this inter-generational clash of substance and delivery gets the better of the movie, as what is an endearingly sweet romantic fantasy is busted by its frustratingly realistic anticlimax of an ending.
The girl in this movie is Paige Morgan (Julia Stiles), of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and the guy is Prince Edvard -- call him Eddie -- of Denmark (Luke Mably). As the title sequence shows, the two couldn’t be more different: she trucks along dusty rural roads in her Ford pickup while he races sports cars through the streets of Copenhagen (he seems to be angling for a role in The Eurofast and the Eurofurious). But as the title itself suggests, the two are destined to meet, when Eddie gets to feeling suffocated by the royal life and is inspired by an ad for a Girls Gone Wild knockoff to leave Denmark for the hard-partying college campuses of the Midwest.
A bit of fish-out-of-water comedy ensues, as Eddie and his personal aide Soren (played with wonderful drollness by Ben Miller) arrive at the University of Wisconsin. Soren opines that a person usually has to be convicted of some sort of crime before being placed in dorm-style housing, and later cooks Eddie eggs benedict on a hotplate. And when Soren makes a derogatory remark about neighboring Minnesota at the student union, he gets a bear hug from a nearby frat boy who shouts, “Wisconsin rules!” to a chorus of cheers.
Then Eddie and Paige meet -- they both work at a campus bar -- and though her mother later insists otherwise, the two actually and regrettably do not have a lot of chemistry. But the scenes where they fall in love are cute. He is mesmerized by a rare moment of her unrestrained self, as she dances with her shoes off while Tom Waits croons on the jukebox after hours. And she realizes he’s not the womanizing, well-dressed ego she initially pegged him to be when he helps her with her Shakespeare homework -- he rhapsodizes about the beauty of a particular sonnet in the laundry room as she helps him sort lights and darks.
Eddie also takes a trip with Paige to her home for Thanksgiving, where he impresses her brothers by souping up the engine on their riding lawnmower -- apparently racing lawnmowers is the sport of kings in upstate Wisconsin -- and also with his country’s stock of famous celebrities (the brothers don’t know who Hans Christen Anderson is, but they can identify with Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Helena Christensen of Victoria’s Secret). It’s the honesty of scenes like this, such as when Eddie and Paige share a very chaste moonlit kiss in her family’s barn, that make their inevitable, prosaic falling-out -- when Paige discovers, with the help of some Danish tabloid photographers, that Eddie is actually Prince Edvard -- seem all the more phony.
Eventually Paige overcomes her misgivings and flies off to Denmark on what is mostly a whim, although in classic Hollywood, doing things on a whim always seemed to work, and the odds improved if the whim came toward the end of the movie -- as it does in The Prince & Me. The final act of the movie has Paige enacting every teenage girl’s dream, which is to fall in love with (literally) her own prince charming, who whisks her off to his castle on horseback before dropping down on one knee to propose marriage and a life lived happily ever after. This much Paige accepts, despite being obviously overwhelmed by her suddenly incumbent duties as the future queen of Denmark -- a bit of a narrative stretch, since marrying into royalty doesn’t automatically make a girl royalty herself.
Nevertheless, marrying into royalty has to be a part of a movie called The Prince & Me, because it is probably the reason why most girls in the audience will be seeing it. Conveniently this movie has been released three years after Disney’s The Princess Diaries, a movie with the same plot -- a regular girl unexpectedly finds her way underneath a crown -- made for a slightly younger audience. That same demographic, now older, is the expected type for Julia Stiles, who, like most teenage actors, has moved out of those years but still finds herself playing to crowds a bit younger than her. Unlike the pop princesses that are moving up Hollywood’s success ladder behind her, though, she has a strong, angular screen presence and a direct intelligence that feels as wholesome as the dusty, mournful jukebox tunes that Paige dances to, and it is probably only a matter of time before she starts picking up some real roles.
Like all dreams, though, the happiness that Paige finds with Eddie at his castle in Denmark is not destined to last, as real life gets in the way. This is a commendably realistic twist to what is mostly a fantastical plot, but if a movie sets itself up as a fantasy from the start there’s no harm in the director and the screenwriter sticking to their guns. When Paige feels compelled to reject Eddie, it seems almost cruel, for he is played by relative newcomer Luke Mably with such dashing charm and a conviction to match (so that what might be over-the-top hokey is actually sweetly sincere). But this rejection is only constructed for the sake of another reunion of great elation in what is already an overlong ending, so that what once was a well-plotted diversion becomes a soggy romantic mess. Better that the movie should’ve relied on its strengths, and thoroughly couched itself in the can’t-miss traditions of classic Hollywood.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)