★★ | Diana
Officially separated from her husband, Diana Princess of Wales is out to hook herself another new man, and the one she has chosen is Hasnet Khan a handsome heart surgeon who she looks up at with her big dewy eyes and blurts out ‘So hearts can’t really be broken then?’
Full credit to actress Naomi Watts who, complete with prosthetic nose, is playing the worlds most famous woman, that she musters as much dignity as she can delivering such clichéd tosh as this straight out of a schoolgirls ‘True Romance’ story. This is from the new biopic that specifically deals with the two years of the doomed affair Diana and Khan had that ended just a year before her untimely death.
The picture painted here is of a lonely and somewhat desperate woman trapped by the restraints of her fame and constantly waging war with her in-laws and the whole Buckingham Palace machinery. She is portrayed as an innocent here, and flirts to capture Khan as if he is the only man she has ever loved. (There is not even a hint to her long affair with James Hewitt etc). Khan is clearly smitten too and soon succumbs to her charms and her wily ways but by dating Diana he starts something he knows he cannot maintain as his devout Muslim family in Pakistan will eventually pressure him to take a traditional wife.
Their two years together are an emotional roller coaster and the movie veers dramatically from showing Diana as this love struck immature girl one moment to the world crusader that she became. In the scenes of the latter, Director Oliver Hirschbiegel, just couldn’t resist in going just a tad too far in making her seem just a little too holy and self-righteous.
Of course the trouble tackling any story on such a major icon like this is that everybody has a fiercely held view on their own. Hence some of the excessive vitriol that was heaped on the movie by the UK press. This may not be a good movie but it is hardly the train wreck that so many Brits (except this one) think it is.
Based on book by journalist Kate Snell it is like, so much that was written about Diana, mainly unsubstantiated and comprised of suppositions and a lot of clever guesswork. What it seriously lacked was not necessarily more facts (god forbid) but a half decent script to replace the embarrassing drivel that newbie writer Stephen Jeffreys had penned. If only Peter Morgan (The Queen) had taken the job on!
The fact however that it was still streaks ahead of a Lifetime for TV biopic was thanks to Miss Watts. She may have been 10 years older than Diana was when she died, and an Australian, and not really looking a lot like her, but she still did a great job.
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