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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The problem with these new movies is that they seem to exist only to sell a line of goods -- good-for-you goods, maybe, but goods nonetheless. And in some cases, even in the midst of asserting that a young woman can do whatever she wants, they still buy into the notion that a real lady (as opposed to, say, your garden-variety woman) should look and act a certain way. In "The Princess Diaries 2" (the sequel to the hugely successful "Princess Diaries," in which an awkward California teenager learns that she's next in line to rule a small, fictional European country named Genovia), Hathaway's character has graduated from college and is now ready to return to the homeland from which her bloodline stems. The bigwigs in Genovia's parliament (and they do wear those ridiculous curly wigs) have told her that she's not allowed to rule the country unless she has a husband. Andrews, as the long-widowed current queen, argues against this old-fangled law, but there's no budging the bigwigs. And so, dutiful to her country above all else, Hathaway agrees to an arranged marriage.
Naturally, there's another guy Hathaway likes better, although she doesn't know it yet. And anyway, the point of the movie is to show that a woman can do very well without a husband, thank you very much, and the plot rattles along toward that conclusion with an efficient clickety-clack. But along the way "The Princess Diaries 2" (which is rated G and seems targeted toward very young girls rather than teenagers or preteens) reinforces some strangely retrograde values. For one thing, Hathaway's character (who, with her creamy glow, looks as if she's stepped out of a Romney painting, although she's curiously lacking in that typically Romneyan mischievous spirit) wears an array of tasteful tweeds and sling-back pumps. In other words, her new royal wardrobe is all granny clothes (and not the hip kind). When Andrews shows Hathaway the apartment-size walk-in closet she's built and stocked for her, the array of dumb pastel bouclé suits and beige heels hits like a fashion H-bomb. All that closet space for a nice-looking 21-year-old with a great figure, and not a wisp of Dolce & Gabbana, or even Missoni, in sight? If not even a princess can have the spring 2004 Louis Vuitton metallic platforms, then what hope is there for the rest of us schmoes?
But one of the beaconlike lessons emanating from "The Princess Diaries 2," as Julie Andrews reminds us in a song (accompanied by a scampering lot of 12-year-old mini-princesses), is that it's what's in your heart that really counts. Thus it follows that clothes and jewels and nice things don't really matter as much as what's inside.
That leaves all us old-school hardcore Cinderella purists stomping our little glass-slippered feet in protest: Half the fun of the Cinderella template is the extravagant loot -- the fabulous gown, the coach made out of a pumpkin, the mice who turn into footmen to cater to our every whim, and so forth. Obviously, if "The Princess Diaries 2" fixated on such shallow concerns, it would be reinforcing materialistic values, which would be a no-no, particularly for the as-yet-uncorrupted tots at which this trifle is aimed. But that just leaves you to wonder: Hathaway's character has, smartly, studied diplomacy and political science in college. But the subtext is that if she wants to succeed in her job, she must never wear anything but dull, unobtrusive, fit-in-at-any-cost clothes. She doesn't dare to ever look or act sexy. (In one scene, she even wears a decidedly un-erotic floppy sunhat that looks like a reject from the original "Stepford Wives.") Her grandmother schools her in the proper way to flutter a fan -- a necessity, I suppose, for any proper princess. And that she should keep her legs together at all times is a directive that needn't even be uttered.
"The Princess Diaries 2" is light and essentially harmless -- I don't really think that bringing your child to it will turn her into a robot matron of tomorrow. Even so, you can't watch the picture and not be at least vaguely aware of the unpleasant grinding sound it makes as it doles out its important lessons about values.
Cheerfully dreary as "The Princess Diaries 2" is, "A Cinderella Story" may be even worse: The chipmunky Hilary Duff plays a smart cookie who desperately wants to go to college, thwarted at every turn by her jealous, Botox-numbed airhead of a stepmother (played by Jennifer Coolidge in a badly written role that abuses her formidable comic gifts).
