The Princess Diaries

Without Anne Hathaway, The Princess Diaries is not worth seeing. There, I said it. Regular readers of this blog will know full well of my adoration for Hathaway, with her glowing charisma and dazzling looks proving simply hypnotic on the big screen. That she will be playing Judy Garland in an upcoming motion picture is no accident of casting. It is destiny.

2001’s The Princess Diaries, however, is formulaic Disney drivel. It is the screen adaptation of Meg Cabot’s 2000 novel of the same name, but the Disneyfied approach to the source material is confusing, muddled, and shockingly outdated. While there’s no question that most Disney projects are years behind the culture curve, The Princess Diaries proves to be outmoded before it even gets out of the gate. While Cabot’s novel offered depth and complexity, Disney’s Garry Marshall directed project fails on just about every front.

Hathaway stars as Mia Thermopolis. She’s an ugly, awkward, shy 15-year-old living in San Francisco. We know she’s a dork because she wears glasses and has bushy eyebrows, but it’s as hard to buy Hathaway as the social outcast as it is to buy Scarlett Johansson as the “ugly sister” in The Other Boleyn Girl. Mia lives with her mother (Caroline Goodall) and cat. The cat, for whatever reason, is given varying amounts of screen time by virtue of it being, well, a cat.

Mia’s life has all the trappings of the stereotypical awkward teenager. She is unpopular, of course, but has a couple of truly close friends in Lilly (Heather Matarazzo) and Lilly’s brother Michael (Robert Schwartzman). Incidentally, Michael has a crush on Mia. Mia is also teased by school bullies, with Lana (Mandy Moore) usually leading the charge.

One day everything changes for Mia when she learns that her grandmother (Julie Andrews) is coming to visit her for tea. Grandma is visiting from the fictional country of Genovia and she drops a bomb on Mia. It turns out that Mia’s recently deceased father was the crown prince of Genovia and that Mia is in line to be princess. Mia is taken aback, naturally, but her grandmother assures her that she’ll turn her into a princess in no time so that she can accept the tiara. Events follow that highlight Mia’s physical transformation into someone more “princess-like” and everything is wrapped up in true Disney fashion.

The Princess Diaries continues to perpetuate the awful Disney philosophy as pertains to looks. Mia must transform her appearance in order to become the princess, of course, and due to the transformation she becomes an entirely different person. Cabot’s novel, conversely, tells it a different way: Mia becomes more uneasy with herself after the makeover.

The way Mia’s character approaches her friends is perplexing. There is very little romantic connection between her and Michael, for instance, and it is hard to buy them as a reasonable “couple” once it pieces together in the end. Schwartzman has the charisma of a fly stuck in Jell-O. Lilly is transformed quite far from the context of the novel, too, and this creates some problems that could have been solved with a stricter editing hand on the film. Mia and Lilly have a few arguments, with one of them based around Mia’s sudden makeover. Lilly is very upset about this when she first sees it, but we aren’t quite sure why.

Those are but logical points, of course, and this is a Garry Marshall film. He’s the guy that glamorized prostitution in Pretty Woman, after all, so anything’s possible when you have the right look. The Princess Diaries could have been done well and provided a solid adaptation of Cabot’s book had it gone with a little more character complexity. Hathaway’s character is hard to follow, for instance, as she simply reacts differently to each situation. She is shy to the point of vomiting in school, but upon seeing her grandmother she becomes a clumsy, slightly obnoxious teenager complete with “shut up” catchphrase.

With a paint-by-numbers flick like this, however, it’s difficult to get hung up on the logistics. This is, after all, a cued, choreographed nightmare of Disney’s epic proportions. It’s hard to believe Disney is capable of producing truly groundbreaking cinema anymore, in point of fact, when 99% of their output seems dedicated to offerings like this and the shockingly superior Hannah Montana franchise. Disney, with a once-stellar record of storytelling and animation, used to be reliable. Now, if not for Pixar, it’s just a dead mouse.

Trailer: