Our story begins in a simpler time, a sweeter time, a more innocent time: the year 2012. You’re Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman. You listlessly poke at the omelette of quail-whites and andouille sausage that your butler has prepared for you. Tomorrow, you ship out for France to begin production on a biopic about Grace Kelly. You know that you should feel more excited, but there’s a pit in your stomach. (And not just because Winslington undercooked your eggs.) Grace Of Monaco felt like a slam dunk when you signed up for it—the director from La Vie En Rose returns to the biopic form just so you can play one of the most glamorous, adored movie stars of all time. You can practically taste the grill you’ll commission to be made from the melted-down Oscar that this role will undoubtedly earn you. And yet, something gives you pause. All is not right here.
Flash-forward to the present day, and Grace of Monaco has suffered the ultimate indignity. After a merciless critical dogpile following the film’s debut at Cannes last May (quoth our man Mike D’Angelo: “Mostly, Kidman just seems lost, and Grace rarely demonstrates any awareness that its ostensible happy ending—Kelly renounces both acting and autonomy to become the ideal housewife, while saving Monaco for tax dodgers—borders on appalling”) and about a year spent languishing in post-production purgatory, Grace Of Monaco will make its big debut as a Lifetime movie on May 25. Though the acquisition represents an unprecedentedly high-profile get for Lifetime, chances are this will be remembered as a low point in the careers of both Kidman and director Olivier Dahan.
If he ever works again, that is. Dahan laid it all on the line with this picture. He went toe-to-toe with Hollywood heavyweight Harvey Weinstein over the final cut of Grace Of Monaco, resisting notes from the studio over the direction and focus of the film. In a bulletin posted about a year ago, Matt Singer broke down the squabbles between the film’s director and distributor: Dahan felt that Weinstein’s instructions to recut the film and shoot additional sequences contextualizing the film’s engagement with French politics would sap Grace Of Monaco’s artistic soul and refused to budge. Dahan’s cut played to jeers in Cannes, and for once, it looked like the eternal struggle between The Weinstein Company and the directorial talent it employs would be better won by Harvey.
Most of the reports out of Cannes agreed that though Grace Of Monaco was a colossal failure, that’s no fault of Kidman’s. She should be able to rebound with minimal trouble—it takes more than a highly public flop to sink an icon of Kidman’s stature—but still, it’s gotta sting to see your movie star biopic on the same network that ran the Lindsay Lohan-starring catastrophe Liz & Dick.