Naomi Watts is one of those performers who seemingly can do no wrong, even in a waxworks like “Diana.” A slice of biographical conjecture about the Princess of Wales, this movie isn’t especially good, but it wins you over a little just because it succeeds where truckloads of sanctifying reminiscences have failed: Anchored by Ms. Watts’s sympathetic performance, it humanizes the woman behind the smile, the helmet hair and the myth. Part reheated gossip, part moony romance, it revisits an affair Diana had with a Pakistani heart surgeon, Hasnat Khan, a liaison she managed to keep from the ravenous media maw that she routinely fed and spectacularly failed to control. The first time you see Diana, she’s padding through the gilt rooms of a luxurious hotel suite, the low-moving camera nipping at her heels. For some reason, the director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, is obscuring Diana’s face, an attempt that quickly feels strained. He may be trying to emphasize the normalcy of the scene by keeping her under wraps. Yet, as Diana walks into a hall, pointedly turns toward the camera and then enters an elevator, where surveillance imagery carries a foreboding time stamp, Aug. 31, 1997, it seems increasingly evident that he’s trying to pump drama into a story that will soon end in off-screen tragedy. Such is the unevenness of his method: He nicely conveys an intimate restlessness, only to blow the mood with ominous tidings. This pretty much describes all of “Diana,” which, like many movie biographies about doomed figures, struggles to find a balance between the historical (life as it was lived) and the histrionic (life as it has been consecrated). After its opening walkabout, the story shifts to two years earlier, when Diana and Prince Charles are already separated. Now ensconced in Kensington Palace in London, with a fairly modest retinue, she is struggling, very much alone, to find her place. (Her sons were often at boarding school.) She meets Hasnat (an appealing, low-key Naveen Andrews, paunched-up and deglammed) when she visits a friend in the hospital. All surgical work and next to no play, Hasnat scarcely gives her a second look, erotic catnip to a woman used to being the center of world attention. The story of Diana’s relationship with Mr. Khan has been told before, including in the touchingly restrained testimony he presented in 2004 during the inquest into her death. The movie is based on Kate Snell’s 2000 account of the relationship in “Diana: Her Last Love,” which, like many such accounts, prematurely wreathes the affair in black bunting. Stephen Jeffrey’s script covers the arc of the relationship — its tentative beginning and predictable complications — which unfolded in private, even as Diana lived out loud. Better yet, the filmmakers make room for the little ordinary things that princesses do after they kick off their heels at the palace — like watching television or using a microwave — normalizing a woman who’s more often mummified than enshrined. It’s this ordinariness that pulls you into the movie, despite its longueurs, overexcited passages and insistent fatalism. Mr. Hirschbiegel recreates some of Diana’s headline moments, like her controversial visit to Angola to draw attention to land mines, but he does better when he follows her after the limo drives off and the smile fades. In scene after scene, he and Ms. Watts — whose face delicately expresses competing emotions, as despair turns to hope, and sincerity battles guile — make Diana’s crushing loneliness palpable, lived-in and real. That loneliness fades after the affair starts, and Diana discovers and savors everyday pleasures, whether she’s driving Hasnat around or accompanying him to a jazz club, unrecognized under her dark wig. It’s like watching a newborn take its first breath.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 20:12:11 +0000
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