The Story Behind Nicole Kidman's Biggest Flop: Grace of Monaco

Before we get started, I want to give a huge thanks to MUBI for sponsoring this video. MUBI is a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from all around the globe. Get a whole month free at MUBI.com slash be kind rewind. A few weeks ago, I was looking for something to watch when I came across Grace of Monaco, a film I primarily remembered for vaguely failing to meet expectations. In my memory, it had a huge press presence before it came out. And why not? Nicole Kidman, one of the greatest actors of her generation, playing Grace Kelly, one of the most famous actors of hers, a delicate beauty who won the Academy Award for Best Actress, then gave up her promising career to become Princess of Monaco. Of course, expectations were high. And then the Cannes Film Festival happened and... Some of the reviewers, though, they didn't like it. It's kind of an understatement to say they didn't like it. One called it a, quote, breathtaking catastrophe. Ouchie. Others called it a, quote, frequently cornball yellow drama with a script that is agonizingly airless and contrived. So I knew that apparently the film wasn't very good. And I wanted to understand what happened. Was it the construction of the film? Was it factually inaccurate? Did it portray a cherished icon in a way people weren't ready for? The more I researched, the more I realized it was all that and more. What started as an exploration of a biopic that underwhelmed a notoriously fickle audience turned out to be a twisted intercontinental power struggle featuring the biggest stars in the world, the royal family of Monaco, and, at least as of a few years ago, the film industry's greatest antagonist. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. I'll lay out the whole saga for you as it played out in the press, including where the film eventually landed, which if you don't already know, I promise you, you cannot predict where that was. I'll also get into the film itself, how it handles Grace Kelly's legacy, what critics did and didn't like, and whether or not it actually deserves the reputation it earned upon its release. Let's begin our story in December 2011. A screenplay titled Grace of Monaco by Arash Amel hits the blacklist, an online platform that highlights some of the best or well-liked unproduced screenplays circulating Hollywood. Grace of Monaco takes place over the course of a few months in 1962. Academy Award-winning actress Grace Kelly has recently abandoned her life as a Hollywood superstar to become Princess Grace, wife of Monaco's Prince Rainier III. One day, Alfred Hitchcock arrives with a proposal make a triumphant return to the screen by starring in his next film, Marnie. Grace is interested. She aches for a creative outlet and some of her best work was done under his direction, but trouble is brewing at home. Diplomatic relations between Monaco and France are fraying, complicating the possibility of resuming her career. Together, Grace and Rainier must continue to assimilate the American princess into Madagascar life, while Grace adjusts her career aspirations and Rainier fends off a French government that seeks to impose its will on his much smaller nation. Stone Angel, a French production company run by Pierre-Ange Lepogam, beat out several other bidders to pick up the rights to the script, and by the next spring, things were already moving fast. In April 2012, Nicole Kidman was in talks to star as Grace Kelly under the direction of Olivier Dahan, who you might recognize as the director of the Edith Piaf biopic, La Vie en Rose. That film was not only wildly successful at the box office in both the United States and especially France, but also with awards bodies, nabbing two Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Marion Cotillard. So, you can see where the hype would come from, right? Nicole Kidman playing America's sweetheart turned literal princess Grace Kelly in a film directed by the guy who just got the biopic performance of a lifetime out of Marion Cotillard in a film that was being compared in tone to The King's Speech, which had just gotten 12 Academy Award nominations and four wins. In January 2013 though, the production hit a slight snag when Kelly's children, Prince Albert II and Princesses Caroline and Stephanie, released a statement upon the release of the trailer accusing the film of being a farce and needlessly glamorized and historically inaccurate. Citing the script in the trailer, the Grimaldi's, the Royal Family, said, the Princely Family does not in any way wish to be associated with this film, which reflects no reality and regrets that its history has been misappropriated for purely commercial purposes. The family's misgivings, however, did not diminish the film's enormous box office and awards potential and would not deter the industry's most insatiable awards glutton from picking it up for distribution. So, in March 2013, the Weinstein Company acquired the film's U.S. distribution rights and planned to give it the Royal Treatment, an award season run with a limited Christmas release in November 2013. That May, Harvey Weinstein included the film in a showcase where the Weinstein Company showed journalists trailers or extended clips of pending Weinstein films, sometimes with the stars in attendance, at the Cannes Film Festival. 2013 looked promising for the company. They had August Ostage County, Fruitvale Station, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, and The Butler. But according to journalists in attendance, Weinstein lavished special attention on Grace. It was no doubt the intended highlight of the evening. Nicole Kidman, who happened to be on the Cannes jury that year, even made a grand appearance. Nigel Smith wrote in IndieWire, looking poised as ever, Kidman introduced the footage, per Weinstein's request, to the packed house, citing that it was nice to be working with Weinstein again, who campaigned hard with Kidman to net her the Best Actress Oscar in 2002 for The Hours. So at that point, in the spring of 2013, the future looked bright. The Weinstein Company saw Grace of Monaco as a big contender come the fall and excitedly made that clear to critics in this splashy preview. But what did critics actually think of what they saw? Well, the five-minute montage of clips was cut too rapidly to sit with, really. And while Kidman certainly looked every bit the elegant princess, it wasn't quite the transformation Marion Cotillard had showed off in La Vie en Rose. And that wouldn't really be necessary to play Grace Kelly. So it was kind of hard to say anything specific about it. Although Smith did note that it was tough to gauge the tone Olivier Dahan was going for, put a pin in that, we will definitely come back to it. Regardless, the key elements for a big Oscar-bae kind of movie were still there. And it wasn't long before extraordinarily premature Oscar predictions flooded the internet. Weinstein films had won Best Actress for two years running, Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady and Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook. Would Kidman be next? The Iron Lady and The King's Speech forged a well-worn path for Grace of Monaco to follow. Everything was going great and then it wasn't. On September 23rd, 2013, the Weinstein Company announced it was no longer planning to release Grace of Monaco in time to qualify for Oscar season. They had decided the film needed more time to be completed and would be released during spring 2014 instead, positioned more as a commercial entry than an awards play. It just wasn't ready, Weinstein said. The score wasn't ready. A lot of things weren't ready. Pundits seemed lightly surprised but understood the delay as practical more than anything. Tim Gray, awards editor of Variety, told The Independent, It's a really crowded race this year. I've talked to several people, including Harvey Weinstein, who thought this was the best year for film they could remember. 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street, Nebraska, Inside Llewyn Davis. Weinstein already had Meryl Streep as a good contender for best actress. No need to compete against himself. And Cate Blanchett was shaping up to be a formidable contender for her performance in Blue Jasmine. If Weinstein thought the film wasn't ready at this point, the industry respected his instincts enough to trust that it wasn't worth releasing a subpar film into that field of contenders. By late September, it didn't seem like Nicole Kidman had a realistic shot at winning anything for Grace of Monaco. A May 2014 release meant she wouldn't qualify for the 2014 awards season. And while, sure, spring movies can win best actress, more often than not, moving a film from a winter to a spring release signals that distributors don't really believe in its awards potential. So a full publicity blitz had been seemingly planned, but had nowhere to go. For example, Kidman graced the cover of Vanity Fair that December, accompanied by a story that weaved the perfect awards season narrative, emphasizing her deep research into her roles and drawing parallels between Kelly and Kidman, their public marriages, the rejection of Hollywood culture, et cetera. So why the sudden change though? Hadn't Weinstein been so eager to showcase Grace of Monaco just a few months earlier? What happened to change his mind? Well, meanwhile, in France, Olivier Dahan spent his 2013 putting together a cut of Grace of Monaco. Upon completion, he sent his version to Harvey Weinstein back in the United States, who allegedly did not like what he saw at all. He later told Deadline in an interview, the script we signed on for was like the King's speech with the big moment where Princess Grace steps up. That's what attracted Nicole. The director is French and he turned it more into a Hitchcock movie, like a PN to Vertigo, which ironically Grace wasn't in. Deeming the film grim and overly melodramatic, Weinstein sent notes to Dahan and Le Pogam on how they might redeem the film before deciding he would just go ahead and produce a new cut himself. He continued to Deadline, the writer Arash Amel called me and said, what happened to my script? It's like, welcome to Hollywood. Writers don't have any say, but we decided to pair him up with a team of people and see what he could do about restoring the movie to the way it looked when he wrote it. Dahan knew this, but when he finally saw the cut Weinstein put together, it was his turn to be appalled. In October 2013, Dahan gave an inflammatory interview with the French daily Liberation, claiming that Weinstein took Grace of Monaco footage without his permission and recut it into what he called a movie that plays like a trailer. Right now, he said, there are two versions of the film, mine and theirs, which I find catastrophic. Weinstein's version was apparently lighter, containing a fair amount of romance and feeling more like a Capra-esque fairy tale. Weinstein, ever sensitive to the tastes of American audiences, aka Oscar voters, believed Dahan's version was more suited to European art house sensibilities. Described as a darker, more tragic story, Dahan's version muted the fairy tale aspects of the film in favor of a mellow drama. Kelly battles with a petulant Prince Rainier soon after arriving in Monaco and is seen suffering in several moments of the film. Lepogang told Variety, when Harvey created the idea of going for the Oscars, suddenly we were in a hurry and had a double rhythm. I guess that's where the problems started. Dahan, a French director working with a French production company, was absolutely stunned, arguing that it was not at all the norm in the French film industry for a distributor to take such an active role in shaping the final cut of the film. France has the right of the author, which essentially means there are more legal protections in place to preserve a director's artistic vision. So why the f**k was this American guy snipping away at his film? If I had made a Hollywood-style film, I would have known what to expect. I know how it goes. After three versions, if it doesn't suit you, you're thrown out of the editing chair and the producer takes over. But this is a French film. So logically, there shouldn't be this type of problem. I can understand that a distributor is interested in and makes the trailer. I can't do everything and that's not the problem. But if you then make an entire film look like the trailer, that's another story. They want a commercial film, something very lowbrow. So they edited out everything messy, everything sharp, everything that was cinematic and resembled real life, he argued. This is all about money and has nothing to do with cinema. For his part, Weinstein wasn't doing anything he hadn't done before. He had become notorious in Hollywood for cutting up movies as he saw fit. He had even earned the nickname Harvey Scissorhands. And plenty of filmmakers from James Ivory to Mike Lee had complained about it. Martin Scorsese battled with Weinstein over the rough cut of Gangs of New York to the point that he wanted to quit working in Hollywood. And if Weinstein had been willing to bully Martin Scorsese, a director he worked with specifically because of his reputation, then surely he would not think twice about forcing a French director with just one hit under his belt to get in line. All the while, DeHaan committed himself to fighting for his version of the film. It's right to struggle, but when you confront an American distributor like Weinstein, not to name names, there isn't much you can do. Either you say, go figure it out with your pile of ----, or you brace yourself so the blackmail isn't as violent. Meanwhile, Le Pogon and DeHaan worked together on a third version that retained the vibe of the French cut, but incorporated some of Weinstein's suggestions. For a while, that seemed to satisfy everyone until January 2014, the Weinstein company pulled the film from their release calendar completely. No March release, as previously promised. In fact, no clear plans to distribute the film at all. If Weinstein wasn't sure when Americans would see the film, DeHaan and French producers wanted to make sure Europeans would. Out of nowhere came the announcement that Grace of Monaco would open the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. According to the New York Times, nobody had told Mr. Weinstein about the plan for the premiere in Cannes. So needless to say, he was furious, not only for being completely blindsided, but also because the announcement undermined Weinstein's claim that the cut needed work, and also seemed to be embarking on a release plan in which the film would roll out in Europe, irrespective of Weinstein's plans for the US. There was very little Weinstein could do. The filmmakers had the right to show their version at the festival. So in April 2014, Variety reported that Weinstein was considering dropping US distribution rights to Grace of Monaco completely, just two weeks before the Nicole Kidman biopic was scheduled to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. However, Kidman met with him personally and strongly expressed her desire for the Weinstein Company to support her movie in America. So Weinstein hit back another way, arguing that he shouldn't have to pay the $5 million he initially agreed to pay for the rights to Grace of Monaco, and forcing the French team into contract renegotiations. He was successful lowering the price of the US distribution deal to $3 million and securing the right to mutually approve any changes made to the version screened in the US. So Grace of Monaco would have an extravagant premiere in a coveted slot at the world's biggest film festival, a symbolic festival for this film, by the way. Cannes was where Weinstein had previewed the film the year prior. It was where Grace Kelly met Prince Rainier in 1955. Cannes is a stone's throw away from Monaco itself, where Kelly's children still lived and had voiced their disdain for the film. So a huge cloud hung over this event. The question of what would happen to the film next remained unanswered. As one journalist put it, how widely the film will be shown and whether it has the sizzle of an awards-worthy release, however, will depend, in part, on its reception at Cannes. Well... It isn't that good film to be presented at the opening of Cannes Film Festival. We usually see many marvelous films, good films, but today, everything's going like this. A little disappointing. I mean, definitely, this was one of the highlights of the festival. Amazing acting, I must admit, but a little melodramatic for my taste. But let's rewind for a second. Opening night had, on the surface, the glitz and glamour we've come to expect for the festival. Yet, Steven Zaitchik observed in the LA Times, the evening had an added element not normally found at Cannes opening nights. Awkwardness. Kidman, as usual, floated on the red carpet. Where Weinstein was conspicuously absent, he said he had pre-planned a trip to Jordan to visit Syrian refugee camps. The jury took to the stage to formally open the ceremony. And side note, I just think it's really funny that Sofia Coppola was on the festival jury for this. Probably the person most familiar with a literal gilded cage film getting a tepid response at Cannes. The cast arrived, Nicole danced in her seat, the movie started, and then it finished. And rather than the prolonged, enthusiastic applause Cannes audiences famously shower on their opening night films, Grace of Monaco received polite and relatively brief clapping. Worse, according to critic Barbara Shares, the screening triggered a plethora of unintended guffaws. At the press conference later that evening, Kidman was asked repeatedly what she made of the Monegasque royal family's discomfort with the film. Obviously, I feel sad because I think that the film has no malice towards the family or particularly towards Grace or Raniere. But of course, the very public spat over the various cuts of the film was top of mind as well. And Dehaan did his best to reassure journalists and the audience that he was satisfied with the cut that premiered. Reviews would echo the clips I showed earlier, but offered much more blunt, biting assessments. Time magazine's critic wrote, often silly but never vivacious, Grace of Monaco fails as both a stately drama of the BBC provenance and an entertainingly trashy tell-all. Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian, the film was a fantastically boring Chanel ad, so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire risk. A fleet of ambulances may have had to be stationed outside the Palais to take tuxed audiences to hospital afterward to have their toes uncurled under general anesthetic. Scott Foundas of Variety called it a frequently cornball melodrama. Stephen Dalton mused in The Hollywood Reporter that Grace of Monaco was relentlessly middle-brown mush that would even disappoint fans of glitzy Euro-trash royalty porn. And my favorite, indeed, the Shrek movies deconstruct fairytale conventions with much more depth and wit than this dreary parade of lifeless celebrity waxworks. Now, you may be asking yourself, is this one of those things where, you know, maybe the Cannes audiences was kind of harsh and actually it's not that bad and am I here to redeem it? These critics were a bit giddy in their insults, but sadly, no, they're right. It's kind of a mess. As far as I can tell, the version that is currently streaming is the version that premiered at Cannes, given that it clocks in at about 103 minutes. And I can absolutely imagine the audience giving polite applause at best when the credits began to roll. I and basically every critic who saw this in 2014 share a few consistent thoughts on where the film fell short. First, the conflict at the heart of the story. Everything that happens in this film in one way or another revolves around Monaco's deteriorating relationship with France. And frankly, it's like, why? In 1962, France was about to lose the Algerian war and needed an infusion of cash. So the government looked to Monaco. Monaco is a French protectorate, meaning although it's its own country about the size of Central Park, France is responsible for its defense, its water, its electricity, its judiciary has a French influence. The monarch is very much working at the French government's behest. Monaco is also famously a playground for the rich, a tax haven populated by more billionaires and millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the world. A place where you're likely to get away with money laundering. And in 1962, 95% of the country's revenue came from its Monte Carlo casinos. So in the movie, when we're asked to spend an hour and a half feeling existentially concerned that Monaco might actually have to pay taxes for once. Well, it's not very sympathetic, is it? The prospect of Monaco losing its independence, I think feels higher stakes on paper, but we aren't really given much of an indication of the Monegasque culture that helps the audience ally itself with that cause. Several critics noted how disconnected they felt from the storyline. Founders wrote in Variety, for all of the movie's efforts to turn this long forgotten turf war into a veritable Côte d'Azur missile crisis, it never registers as more than a trumped up teacup tempest. One whose worst possible outcome is that a few thousand tax dodging bourgeoisies might be forced to become French citizens. Ultimately, the conflict is resolved when Grace organizes a ball where she gives a big speech about how it would be nice if everyone could love each other, which is apparently enough to convince the president of France that he should back off. Maybe I'm naive, but I believe in fairy tales. The whole speech is deeply silly, something that you might take seriously from a 10 year old, not an adult woman in a position of diplomatic importance. It's love that will make us put away our guns and our politics and our fears and our prejudices. And it's love that will eventually make everything right. Again, Dalton's stinging assessment in The Hollywood Reporter gave me a chuckle. Given this tiny tax haven's long history as a magnet for playboy gamblers, shady oligarchs and money launderers, this comically absurd climax comes perilously close to the pussies, dicks and assholes speech at the end of Team America World Police. The second consistent issue was the film's construction. We know that it was likely Frankensteined together with conflicting input from feuding parties. And you can tell some of the edits are deeply unnatural or 80 yard to death, like this one. When will you start a morning, your highness? I'm sorry? Look, magazine, we received a copy of your press release this morning. The cinematography could be bizarre, like these extended closeups, which critic Oliver Littleton described in IndieWire as searching around her head like a drunken rostrum camera operator. It's full of well-worn kitschy gimmicks like maps. The score is extraordinarily heavy handed and sometimes tonally confusing. The aforementioned ball, for example, is this organizational triumph for grace, but what should be a moment of exciting anticipation is accompanied by a haunting, intense score that suggests there's going to be a murder, not a speech about love. The third issue, perhaps the most concerning in my opinion, was that Grace of Monaco doesn't give a very good sense of who Grace Kelly was. There is very little in this film beyond the literal circumstances of her life that feels specific to Grace Kelly. No hobbies or habits, no quirks, no flaws, no sexual desire. Grace Kelly is, according to this film, the most beautiful, saintly, asexual woman in the world. Sure, she gets frustrated, but she never does anything that would remotely alienate the audience. She simply wants to build hospitals and gallantly put her own ambitions aside to play the greatest role of all, princess. The borderline regressive ending of the film all but deifies her with this bizarre montage martyring her with an angelic chorus and a voiceover praising her every quality. Kidman, like every other lead actor in a biopic, spent a lot of time detailing her preparation for this role. I mean, I studied her and then I tried to, because I watched, I listened to her vocally, I watched her physically, and then I also read and absorbed a lot of things. I talked to people, I watched interviews and I really watched the interviews and tried to sort of read between the lines and then that ultimately becomes how do I feel her? Because there's, you know, portraying her and putting her on a pedestal, but how do I actually feel the things that she felt? I have a lot of sympathy for her here because I think Grace Kelly would be a very difficult role to play. Not only because, I mean, she's a monarch, so that comes with a lot of responsibility, but also because she wasn't the most idiosyncratic person. Grace Kelly wasn't a blank slate, but she wasn't like Bette Davis or Elizabeth Taylor, where an actor can check off a list of very recognizable mannerisms that clearly evoke that person. Embodying Grace Kelly requires something much more subtle, difficult to place, and frankly, runs the risk of painting a flat portrait of propriety. You need a good script and a good director who can draw those things out and distinguish the real life person from the woman we see in the movies. But given the lack of cues in the script and I assume the direction, Kinman really appears stranded in this role and I suspect she felt that way too because she falls back on pretty much every acting tick she has to support herself. The tearful whispers, the classic exasperated Nicole Kidman. It's rare to see middling reviews for a Nicole Kidman performance, but critics sense there was little for her to grasp onto. The actress never appears to fully connect with the character, delivering a series of doleful little girl lost poses. More pointedly, the New York Times later wrote, Ms. Kidman is not bad as Grace Kelly. She just isn't Grace Kelly. She's lovely. The hair, the makeup, the costumes are excellent, but the actress works so hard to recreate the movie star's voice, mien and magic, that the distance is only magnified. That the film never really interrogates Kelly as a person is particularly disappointed because this whole situation has incredible potential. Grace Kelly made a radical decision to leave Hollywood. She won the Academy Award and suddenly she was, you know, marrying Regnier and becoming a princess. I mean, if that happened now, it would be like somebody, you know, here going off and marrying, you know, Prince Harry, right? And then she wasn't simply an actress. She was the star of the moment, a woman who had risen to such heights that she would have had the power to say what she wanted to make and with whom. So why make this choice? Was the lure of being a princess so attractive? Did love really conquer all? I think this story is often told that way because it's whimsical and convenient. But as always, reality reveals a much more complex personality than Kelly is usually given credit for. Grace Kelly loved falling in love and she had many times, but never with men who were literally or emotionally available. And as she got older and everyone around her married, she began to feel left behind because in the 1950s, being single over the age of 25 basically made you an old hag. The more she looked around, the more she craved the kind of personal life that had eluded her and resented the shallow, tenuous life movie stardom provided. Sometimes looking back after so many years, I think I really hated Hollywood without knowing it, she later said. I had lots of acquaintances there and people I enjoyed working with and learned a lot from, but I found a great deal of fear among people in Hollywood, fear of not succeeding and fear of succeeding, but then losing success. The unhappiness out there was like smog. It covered everything. She loved Rainier, but she also wanted a chance to pivot away from the stressors of the film industry. At the same time, while Grace Kelly may not have liked Hollywood, she loved acting. She had been ambitious enough to set out on her own as a teenager to learn the craft. And even after landing her breakout role in High Noon, she returned to New York to continue her studies and improve her skill set. According to her biographer, Donald Splato, as well as interviews with family and friends, Kelly never really believed that her husband would impose a permanent ban on her acting. Things would slow down, of course, but surely opportunities would arise in the future. In other words, it must not have actually felt like a career-ending decision to leave Hollywood for Monaco when she chose to marry Prince Rainier. Everything happened so fast. Remember, she met him in May 1955 and they were married in April 1956. That's pretty heartbreaking to me. It's also a good story. The relief of leaving a rotted industry, conflicting with yearning to exercise the craft she dedicated her life to since she was a teenager. The excitement of forming her own family like she always wanted, conflicting with the fear of uprooting her life and the pressure of learning new customs. The happiness of shedding the label movie star, conflicted with the new levels of public scrutiny as a princess. Grace of Monaco kind of gets into these conflicts, but because it's so concerned with shoehorning in that dumb problem with France, it doesn't really have the time to explore them. The plotline about nearly getting a role in Marnie feels like a good second act to a larger story about Grace's continued efforts to figure out what a fulfilling life would look like for her. Becoming a movie star wasn't quite it, but losing access to her creative outlet wasn't ideal either. And at some point, she must have realized that it would be forever. Obviously, the real story regarding Marnie has much more complexity than the film depicts too. Regnier supported Kelly's decision to accept Hitchcock's offer, but over time, the logistics made it impossible. Tony Lee Morrell's book Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie details to the day the casting process of that film. Broadly speaking, he attributes Kelly backing out of the role to a combination of factors. First, Hitchcock needed more time to finish the birds, so he had to postpone the filming of Marnie. And in doing so, the production no longer lined up with the royal family's annual vacation to the United States when Kelly hoped to film with the whole family present. He quotes her as saying, I could have only done it if my husband and the children had come with me. This was impossible. Going on with the plan created too many problems, so I called Mr. Hitchcock and said I couldn't do it. Second, Morrell cites the Marnie files of the Hitchcock collection, which contain a memo suggesting that the political situation in Monaco required the presence of the prince, meaning Kelly too was unlikely to leave. This is, of course, the main reason given in the film. However, according to Spado, the reason Kelly backed out was much more personal and not one she was likely to reveal in interviews. In June 1962, Kelly had a miscarriage that left her shaken physically and emotionally. Working out the timeline, this explains Grace's acceptance of Hitchcock's offer on March 19th before she knew of her pregnancy. It also justified her decision to withdraw on June 1st after the pregnancy was confirmed, but was not going well. It would have been impossible for Grace to shoot in August, which at the time was the scheduled start date for production. Spado writes, the matter of Grace's pregnancy was not considered appropriate to be made public, so the official reason for her withdrawal was later given as an outcry from the Monegasque press and from certain citizens who thought that Grace's participation in Marnie heralded a permanent return to Hollywood. That would have been unacceptable and Rainier's advisors would have counseled strongly against such a step. Later that June, Kelly wrote a letter to Hitchcock expressing her disappointment. It was heartbreaking for me to have to leave the picture. I was so excited about doing it and particularly about working with you again. When we meet, I would like to explain to you all of the reasons, which is difficult to do by letter or through a third party. Thank you, dear Hitch, for being so understanding and helpful. I hate disappointing you. I also hate the fact there are probably many other cattle who could play the part equally as well. Despite that, I hope to remain one of your sacred cows. There's something quite sad about this, isn't there? It's wild to remember that Grace Kelly was only a working movie star for about three years. The first three years of any major star's career rarely reveal anything about what they could actually do. Imagine if we just judged Bette Davis on everything she made before of human bondage. I can't help but wonder what Kelly could have achieved because I do think she had enormous potential. Yeah, OK. Maybe I'm one of those people who's a little justifiably salty that she beat Judy Garland in the 1954 Best Actress race. But you can't blame her for simply receiving votes for starring in something that was actually kind of a risk for her. And I dare you to watch Rear Window or High Society and not want to see what she could possibly do next. That said, I don't think it's appropriate to frame her life as the melodramatic tragedy heroic sacrifice this epilogue makes it out to be. Kelly may not have acted, but she was industrious and found ways to incorporate her love of the arts into her work as a princess, reinventing Monaco as a cultural hub. She formed a ballet academy, participated in documentaries, supported artists financially, gave poetry readings around the world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So as far as the historical accuracy of Grace of Monaco goes, it's not a documentary. Biopics always shift things around. It definitely exaggerates, but I don't think it invents anything that's egregiously offensive a la Blonde. Although the prince's sister definitely draws the short end of the stick. She's framed as a traitor to the throne here, which she sort of was, but it had nothing to do with the France situation at all. I just think this movie uses history in the least interesting way possible. But just to round out some of my grievances, I've never seen Parker Posey less utilized than in this film as a Mrs. Danvers type lady in waiting. This film also leans hard on my least favorite biopic trope, constantly winking at the audience's knowledge. There isn't a second Hitchcock is on screen that doesn't include a reference to one of his films or even films he has nothing to do with. Broccoli's just made a spy movie with some Scottish fella he's raving about. So we can all smugly nod and turn to our neighbor and whisper, he's talking about James Bond. They wrote Robert McNamara into the script as an attendee of the ball. He was one of the architects of the Vietnam War, a man literally responsible for carpet bombing civilians. And this is the line they give him to show how successful Grace's speech was. I also just have to point out this line because it made me laugh. Anyway, Grace of Monaco opened in Europe in the summer of 2014 and grows to $26.6 million, which back then was considered a disappointing number. To give you a sense of how much that is, adjusted for inflation, that's more than the holdovers Priscilla and Asteroid City pulled in last year. Perhaps the most annoying aspect of this movie flopping at Cannes was that it allowed Harvey Weinstein to frame himself as correct for loudly denouncing it for months. He told Deadline in an interview, I'm reading all these accounts of how Harvey Weinstein must have been a genius for trying to prevent this. Now we get it. Nevermind that the Cannes version included input from him. I don't want these fights, Weinstein continued. Olivier Dahan wanted to do what Olivier wanted to do. He called me names in the French newspapers. I figured the best thing to do was to step out. And how would Weinstein step out exactly? In April 2015, it was announced that Grace of Monaco would not get a theatrical release in the United States, as he had initially agreed, and would instead premiere on Lifetime on Memorial Day weekend. This is before a film would go straight to a streaming service. So this is as close to dumping it into obscurity as you could get in 2015. No week-long stint in a handful of coastal independent theaters. The Cannes opener premiering on Lifetime. I know I just criticized the film for like 15 minutes, but you have to admit that it's a shocking development for a film once deemed a promising awards prospect. And knowing Weinstein and how much it made in Europe, the sale reads less like an efficient business decision than a petulant one-upsmanship. DeHaan didn't fall in line and his film got what it deserved. The screenwriter, Arash Amel, had become quite adamant that DeHaan had taken the film in the wrong direction too, and stood by Weinstein's quest to recut it. Going so far as to say in an interview that it was his filmmaking Vietnam. I survived it, but I'll never be the same. Upon the announcement that the film would air on Lifetime, Amel tweeted, I'm just glad the director's vision found its rightful home. He then announced that he was going to live tweet Grace of Monaco's premiere, which he did. He seems to have deleted those tweets since then, but the Wayback Machine exists, so no, he didn't. And most entertainment outlets covered it anyway. Using the hashtag GOMFAQS, he began, the purpose of this live tweet is to correct the record, an explanation, an apology, and most of all, a bit of lighthearted fun. Some of the tweets are informative. He noted that the Lifetime version was significantly shorter than both the Weinstein and French cuts, and clarified his own involvement in creating the Weinstein cut. We also learned that the final speech survived intact from the original script. He showered praise on Kidman, but he also took the opportunity to take some personal shots and point out where the film differed from his intentions as a screenwriter. Stuff like, they were not meant to be shouting at each other. It was meant to play under the surface. The over-the-top and stilted setups is purely intentional direction. The text was written as free-flowing and naturalistic. Someone turn that ******* music off. We had it as Ennio Morricone in the temp. I fought the good fight, but the law is the law. Sometimes you get true foe and sometimes you get this. Kept it tame tonight. I'll keep people storming off set, three hour shooting days and missing sets for my memoirs. People found all this very juicy or to put it in the most 2015 way possible. Yep, at ArashML wins Twitter this week. Everybody has a right to say whatever they want on the internet. And obviously, I actually share a lot of his opinions on the quality of the film and just echoed some of those same sentiments in this video. But I think there's a huge difference between me, some random YouTube critic saying these things and the literal screenwriter of the film publicly denouncing it. I can't imagine reading these tweets would encourage potential collaborators to want to work with you. And I'd wager that's why they're now deleted. In terms of the long-term effects of Grace of Monaco, obviously the film didn't hurt Kidman's career. She's doing great. We love her. She even got a SAG nomination out of it. Amel is still working. I liked A Private War. And I'm also super curious if he checked in with the Astaire Estate about that alleged clause in Fred's will that states he doesn't want a biopic made about him before he wrote Fred and Ginger. I'm not up on what's going on in the French film industry, but Dahan suspiciously didn't have a credit for seven years after Grace of Monaco. And Weinstein, well, we all know what happened to him. I fully realize that the story I'm telling here is probably only a fraction of what actually happened. The press always just gets the tip of the iceberg. And when it came to Harvey Weinstein, there was a lot of ---- still happening in the depths. As I mentioned, he did this to a lot of films. But to me, this specific instance is important to highlight because it begs the question, who has the right to tell a story? Is it the director? The screenwriter? A biographer? A YouTuber? What about the Monegasque people? Kelly's children? Biopics will always be wild because they are a tug of war between the truth and entertainment. Between those interested on a deeply personal level and those interested in cashing in on name recognition. The legend goes that Harvey Weinstein was thanked more often than God at the Oscars. I don't think this is the worst biopic I've ever seen, but Grace of Monaco would certainly become no such occasion. Look, the controversy behind the making of Grace of Monaco is pretty indisputable, but maybe I'm completely wrong about the quality of the film. Maybe you'd actually like it. Maybe you're a big Grace Kelly fan and you're morbidly curious about whether or not you'd get anything out of it. Well, there's only one way to find out. Watch the movie. And luckily with the link in my description below, you can do that right now for free on Mubi. Mubi is a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from all around the globe. From iconic directors to emerging auteurs, there's always something new to discover. With Mubi, each and every film is hand selected by a wonderfully talented team of curators. You can discover the best of cinema at your fingertips, streaming anytime, anywhere. Mubi can really scratch any itch you have as a cinephile. Yes, they'll show you some of Khan's most infamous flops like Grace of Monaco, but they'll also give you access to genuinely incredible works of art. What if you wanted to watch a better reviewed Nicole Kidman movie? Well, I recently caught Dogville for the first time on Mubi. In this minimalist staging by Lars von Trier, Kidman, coincidentally, plays a mysterious woman named Grace who hopes to convince the people of the small town of Dogville to hide her from criminals who pursue her. At first they do, but soon they begin to take advantage of her willingness to work. And eventually it devolves into a very bleak, violent portrait of humanity. It has an insane cast that includes Patricia Clarkson and Lauren Bacall. And I promise you, you've never seen anything like it. By simply clicking the link in my description below, you can check out both of these films for free. If you love movies, it's the single best click you can make on the entire internet. Just go to Mubi.com slash Be Kind Rewind for a whole month free. A world of cinema can be at your fingertips. Get your month free at Mubi.com slash Be Kind Rewind today.