Talkie Tuesday: Diana

"Somewhere beyond right and wrong is a garden. I will meet you there."

Hello everyone!

It's back to biographical movies this week after our little interlude with the Academy Awards last Tuesday (for the blog post I typed about it, you can click on the link here). As I said when I typed about Grace of Monaco, I have a thing for these kinds of movies. 

I don't really know why.

But I do know some of my favourites are from this genre, including The Butler and The Imitation game, for one, and let's not go into Titanic or The King's Speech or something.

I just have a soft spot for these kind of biopics as they call them, and I tend to watch a number of them each year as I discover them. I have a few waiting on the list still, but for tonight I'm going to go through my backlog of reviews and dig out one that I SHOULD have watched way back when in 2015 while I was at the seaside singing Kumbaya and drinking cocktails.

Ahem.

I didn't do either of that, really. Well, not much anyway. And I also didn't watch Diana until very, very recently, regardless that it's three years old by now.

So when I initially grabbed this movie, I did so because of the other one, Grace of Monaco, and the fact that Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts are pretty much BFFs in real life, so it made sense to watch these back-to-back if I could. Unfortunately, that plan went down the drain after I saw Grace, since I was less than impressed with that movie. But I wrote all that two weeks ago, so let's move on to Diana, shall we?

Unfortunately, I wasn't any happier about this one than the last.

Diana tells the story of the last two years in the life of a woman we all still miss today, even if we were too little to really understand what was happening until much later in our lives. This means covering between 1995 and 1997, until the crash that took her life in the Paris tunnel.

We actually start out right before said crash, before we rewind and go back to 1995, and then dig into Diana's life the way we perceived it was behind closed doors when no camera was pointed at her face.

A lot of this movie is about her personal life instead of the one she shared with the public, namely her relationship with the cardiologist she fell in love with (and who obviously didn't realize just what he was signing up for when he fell for her, because seriously dude, how did you NOT see the invasion to your private life coming?) and how she eventually tried to make him jealous with Dodi, who unfortunately ended up in the car with her during that fateful night when everything sort of came to a standstill.

You can probably count the number of times that's happened over the years on the fingers of one hand.

On the other hand of the movie, we also have her humanitarian work and her continuing battle with the palace and the press, as they think she's a loose cannon, while she's dealing with land mines in Angola and pushing for the Ottawa Treaty.

The movie ends with the accident and people placing flowers in front of her home, and a distraught cardiologist.

I have to say, with as much pomp as went around this movie, I was shocked at their timing (I think it was actually very soon around the date of The Wedding, or close to the birth of Prince George, and I thought that was just horrible taste), and frankly unimpressed. There were a lot of blank moments in the movie with no background music and just shots of Watts' as Diana walking along for some reason. And a lot of shots of her staring into nothing. And some more of her looking shocked.

All in all, not my cup of tea.

And for some reason, I don't know why, but I remember an interview I watched a while ago when a make-up artist confided that Diana loved nothing more than a blue liner on her bottom lash line, and she'd put it on despite everyone's efforts to get her to wear brown or black ... and with as many close-ups as this movie had, you'd think there'd be something blue there.

Nope.

Maybe it's just me, but the detail bugged me quite a bit.

All in all, not a movie I'll remember as a good one, sadly.

xx

*images and video not mine