I’m not sure how to begin this review of “Diana,”because figuring out my own feelings is kind of difficult. The most important question: Should “Diana” be treated as historical, inarguable fact? Of course, Princess Diana’s death in 1997 was a significant cultural moment; I was 9 years old, and I was listening to my small handheld radio in my bedroom, reading a book, and I burst into tears immediately when I heard the news. Immediately! And then my mom came in and she started crying, too. I was an American child too young to fully understand Diana’s role to the British monarchy and the British people, but I construed her as a young, beautiful princess who wanted to make the world a better place. As someone who grew up on Disney movies full of young, beautiful princesses who wanted to make the world a better place, you may grasp why I found her so appealing, and her death so tragic.
And “Diana” works very, very hard to make sure we all understand how appealing and tragic Diana was, beginning with her death and then jumping backward two years to trace her life up until that final car ride. But how director Oliver Hirschbiegel and screenwriter Stephen Jeffreys (working off the 2001 book “Diana: Her Last Love,” by journalist Kate Snell) try to prove this to us is steeped in melodrama and cliché, as well as a weird kind of belittling misogyny. By focusing on a supposedly intense and private romance with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, who allegedly decided not to marry Diana because of his mother’s disapproval and the intense media attention following her, the movie tries to make the argument that … Diana needed to be loved? I guess?
What the movie is trying to do, really, is kind of a mystery. The first half feels very soap opera, very made-for-TV movie, and Naomi Watts feels like an actress dressing up in Diana’s most famous outfits rather than fully inhabiting her persona. Things get better as the movie progresses and Watts and Andrews enter into a kind of romantic groove, but how much you’ll enjoy this is how much you believe Snell’s account of the romance and how much you can tolerate Jeffreys’s clichéd dialogue. “You don’t perform the operation, the operation performs you,” says Andrews-as-Khan, a line that makes Diana gasp in rapt surprise. “I’ll never be happy again,” she cries to a friend when she and Khan break up. You get the sense that these people loved each other, but that’s only because each of them keeps staring at their cell phones, waiting for the other to call. Such hardship!
I am being slightly sarcastic, but only because I really want to believe this love story really happened. Because it would make more sense to me that Diana would fall for Khan, someone bettering people and trying to save the world, than a playboy like Dodi Fayed. But Diana using the tabloids to document her romance with Fayed, just to make Khan jealous? Or Diana being so clueless about how to act with African orphans that she would call Khan and literally ask him, “What should I do?” Or Diana saying something as prophetic as, “Now that I’ve been loved, I don’t feel lonely anymore”—only a short time before her death?
Too much of this movie feels made specifically for the movie, which goes directly against its alleged realism, and leaves the audience confused about the point of it all. Watts and Andrews do their best, but they never seem to transcend two people pretending. The movie is getting ripped to shreds in the U.K., but it doesn’t deserve all that hatred. It’s not terrible, necessarily—but given Khan’s real-life refusal to discuss his relationship with Diana, given the inability to really corroborate any of this, the film feels (much like Khan supposedly told Diana of their relationship), “pointless.”
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 Guttenbergs
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