"Diana"

In recent years, British cinema has developed a trend of biographies about the lives of 20^th century British political leaders and public figures. I think we can hold screenwriter Peter Morgan responsible for it, after Stephen Frears’ “The Queen”, which he wrote, garnered international commercial and critical success. Afterwards came Jean-Marc Vallée’s “The Young Victoria” – which I haven’t seen – in 2009, Tom Hooper’s decent-but-overrated “The King’s Speech” in 2010, Phyllida Lloyd’s disappointingly by-the-numbers “The Iron Lady” – aka “Margaret Thatcher’s Greatest Hits” – in 2011 and Roger Michell’s “Hyde Park On Hudson” in 2012 – which I have not seen either.

The success of this British biographical subgenre suffered somewhat after the mixed reviews received by the last two films, and the overwhelmingly negative critical reception “Diana” has received does not bode well for its future. Savaged by British and French reviewers alike, the film – particularly its screenplay – has been likened to Harlequin novels and soap operas such as “The Young And The Restless” due to its treatment of the ill-fated romance between Princess Diana (Naomi Watts) and Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews of “Lost” and “The English Patient” fame), which lasted two years before her tragic death in a car accident in Paris.

While “Diana” is plagued by many problems, some of which involve its romantic content, it isn’t quite the cinematic trainwreck so many have described. Its primary success is the portrayal of an emotionally exhausted naïve idealist with a messiah complex and a desperate need to be loved. I don’t know if that was what the real Diana was like, but the film is at its best when it focuses on her struggle with finding her purpose and dealing with her fame, making questionable decisions – such as her famous televised interview with Martin Bashir – and being constantly assaulted by paparazzi.

Alas, the crux of the film is devoted to her relationship with handsome, erudite Pakistani cardiologist Hasnat Khan and the conflict between their lifestyles. While Naveen Andrews gives a very convincing performance and shares decent chemistry with Naomi Watts, the characters’ romantic interactions are predictable and safe, never giving the audience the treat of being surprised or uncomfortable, never straying away from contemporary movie romance territory: Diana cleaning up Hasnat’s room when he’s not there, complete with a lipstick heart on his mirror; a – possibly fictional – best friend Sonia (Juliet Stevenson, the most underrated actress in the UK) who never rises above the stock “best friend” character you’ve seen in countless contemporary romance films…. We even get an incredibly corny musical montage of Hasnat and Diana fooling around in the countryside. To make the montage even more ridiculous, it’s set to Jacques Brel’s beautiful song “Ne Me Quitte Pas”. I guess Oliver Hirschbiegel was trying to hit us home with the inevitability of their relationship’s tragic end, but his dissonance achieves silliness rather than poignancy.

This demonstrates the heart of the film’s problem: It treats its protagonists as romance film archetypes rather than the real people they were. “The Queen” was successful because it treated its characters with restraint and dignity. This glamour tabloid characterization makes the film’s condemnation of the paparazzi feel hollow, even hypocritical. At times it feels like it could have been written by a devout reader of Paris-Match. I counted three instances of someone reminding her “you’re the most famous woman in the world” as if she were a chosen one. No wonder the real Hasnat Khan found the film laughable.

And this sappiness quickly infects the portrayal of Diana’s activism as well. We are treated to scenes of her visiting landmine victims in hospital, observing demining activities and making speeches at various charities. Stephen Jeffreys’ screenplay depicts these activities as a way for Diana to both put her much-hated fame to good use and get in the public’s good eye. This could have been a good occasion to present us a more ambiguous Diana, perhaps even wonder if she herself wondered how sincere she really was in those efforts, but we get no such complexity. It reaches a culmination in two particularly bad scenes:

-          Diana is visiting Italy, surrounding by a crowd of onlookers and photographers. She sees a blind man standing confused & frightened by the noise, walks to him, calmly takes his hands and lets him touch her face. All that’s missing is a heavenly choir.

-          Diana is being driven through the Bosnian countryside for a diplomatic visit, sees a Bosnian Muslim woman at a cemetery visiting her son’s grave, orders the car to be stopped and gets out to hug her, snapped by accompanying cameras. The event is displayed on newspaper front pages with the proud headline “This is the real Diana”.  Rarely have I seen a shot contain so much unintentional irony and lack of self-awareness.

 We are meant to side with Diana constantly, rarely question her or allow ourselves to not completely adore her. That attitude appears to waver when Diana causes Hasnat to dump her or argue with her. The first is when Hasnat is exposed by tabloids as her secret lover, and her reaction is to deny it publicly, thinking she’s doing him a favour but only succeeding at making him a laughing stock. An insightful screenwriter could have seized the opportunity to illustrate her character’s lack of touch with common people and their problems, but the incident is forgiven soon enough. She angers him a second time when she attempts to conciliate her life and his by making Doctor Christian Barnard (Michael Byrne) recommend him for a position in Boston, not realizing his attachment to his life in London. She reacts to him dumping her by trying to call him using a fake Liverpool accent and screaming his name outside his window. This stalker behavior is another potentially interesting character facet to be explored, but it is again quickly forgiven.

When Hasnat dumps Diana for good, Diana decides to fully embrace the paparazzi’s obsession with her by contacting tabloid reporter John Fraser – with the rather jarring calls of “Hello, handsome!” – and making sure he captures every shot of her kissing Dodi Al-Fayed on his yacht. All of this, the film implies, is done in attempts to make Hasnat jealous – or spite him – and get him to notice her. Scenes on the yacht reminded me of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura” and his pertinent portrayals of the emotional alienation experienced by the rich and successful. A better film would have taken cues from him and explored Diana’s constant need to be loved, by both men and the general public, and exposed its destructive effects on her.

This need to be loved is explored too little and sunk by simplistic dialogue with her therapist Oonagh (Geraldine James) about a recurring dream she has about falling, which she interprets at first as a fear of letting go, before deciding she wasn’t falling but flying.

Diana’s children William and Harry are mentioned but only seen once - from a large camera distance – in a brief scene in which she waves goodbye to them and hopes to see them in four weeks. It’s clearly implied to be the last time she ever saw them in person, and is the first of many examples of the film’s transparency in its attempts to emotionally manipulate its viewers. It becomes more blatant in the depiction of Diana’s final moments before leaving the hotel, as Diana comes to the end of a corridor and turns around to gaze at the emptiness behind her, in a deep-focus crane shot accompanied by a rumbling background noise dominating the soundtrack. As she resumes her walk, the scene becomes more distasteful as the soundtrack gets overrun by repeated mobile phone rings from Hasnat – who hadn’t been returning her calls – met with Diana’s answering machine.

If the film manages to remain watchable and even intentionally entertaining in spite of these large problems, it owes most of it to Naomi Watts. Her performance is heartfelt, committed and subtle, never trying to be as blatantly manipulative and forced as Hirschbiegel’s direction, yet sadly restricted by the screenplay’s reluctance to treat her character as a three-dimensional complex human being.

It saddens me to see so little true emotion and humanity from the director whose film “Downfall” boldly dared to examine Adolf Hitler’s state of mind with compassion and sobriety as his world literally crumbled above and around him. Without brushing off his crimes, he had managed to make audiences feel sorry for the most deservedly reviled man in history. You’d think he would be capable of showing similar insight in doing the same thing for one of the most admired women of her time. Alas, while the film is never as cringe-inducingly awful as I was afraid it might be, it isn’t good enough to deserve Naomi Watts’s beautiful performance.