Charles & Diana: A Royal Love Story

Pity the British actors! Forced to do their best in a criminally bad American hashing of what was then the latest royal headline story. The American pay was better than any similar work from a British production and they were probably only too glad it wasn't run in the U.K., like those Japanese commercials where American stars get a truckload of dough and the contract says "we won't run this in the States."

When Prince Charles and Diana Spencer announced their engagement back in the early 1980s, the press and folks around the world went gaga. Their wedding also was watched by many millions of people and it's hard to describe the hysteria surrounding this supposedly magical couple. Not surprisingly, it also resulted in some mostly fictional movies, such as "The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana" as well as this film. Sadly, it was all for nought, as the marriage turned out to be a trainwreck...and a very public and ugly one at that.

So, despite there actually being very little romance, is the film worth seeing? For most, I would say no...as it's hard to enjoy this froth knowing the true story.

What did I like and not like about this film? The first thing I noticed is that David Robb was an odd choice to play Charles, as he looked little like the guy...though he DID have a bit of a resemblance to Charles' 'unusual' brother, Andrew. I did like seeing Charles Gray as Diana's father and Christopher Lee as Charles' father, Prince Philip....both were very good. But the story, well, that's the main thing...a huge problem that even good acting cannot overcome. Reasonably well made...but completely outdated and a bit sad to watch.

It's impossible to watch this without a mind for retrospect and to be very frank, this TV movie has not aged well. There are some very recognizable names in the cast, and as Caroline Bliss marks her debut, she joins Christopher Lee and Charles Gray as actors on hand who were or would be noted for their contributions to Eon's James Bond franchise. The presence of that ensemble is one of the few aspects of 'Charles & Diana: A royal love story' to earn praise. The title alone says it - this is a film about burgeoning romance, and one of the most (in)famous pairings in recent history. But the fact that it was rushed into production to air on ABC in the United States barely one year after the titular figures' real life wedding is plainly dubious. This is nothing if not an outright cash grab (for advertising dollars), and an ample illustration of the bizarre cultural obsession with the British royal family. Those truths should have been evident enough in 1982, and 40 years later, the picture is even more curious.

With that angle in mind, it rather feels like substantial effort was put into significantly padding out the context of then-recent actual events to make the production feature-length. The nature of that padding is an endless stream of tropes in the characters, dialogue, scene writing, and narrative, and considerable ham-handedness in inflating "a" love story, a cinematic staple, into "the" love story of the decade (or why not the century?). Take away the conscious embellishment, the real-life titanic figures at the center of the feature, and the questionable intentions of the producers, and this could be any romantic comedy from the past 40-50 years. Take away those factors, though, and for better or worse you also omit the most attentively minded elements of the picture. For the second time in two paragraphs I can only say that to be blunt, the material is pretty thin. All things considered it's not bad, and if one can try to accept 'Charles & Diana' at face value then it is, legitimately, a passably entertaining tale of two people finding each other. Yet given what the actors have to work with, it largely feels like they're generally doing the bare minimum, with only ever the merest glimmers of sincerity - because the bare minimum is all they CAN do under these circumstances. At some points more than others, it really feels like writer John McGreevey, and director James Goldstone, were promised paychecks to turn out the feature, and in their respective fashions they sketched out the least that could fit the bill. If not all the time, that lack of true fastidious care does show through - such as in Charles and Diana, who as written scarcely feel like real people, only plastic smiling faces.

However, it's so very difficult to take this at face value, the approach which would grant the film the greatest favor. Because once more, apart from the clear motivations behind the production, 40 years later its content looks wildly different. An early expository scene showing a fox hunt is now colored by the wider recognition of how unabashedly cruel the practice is, and the admirable efforts to sabotage it and see it outlawed. A passing early line of dialogue describing Prince Andrew as "a great chum" is all but jaw-dropping, given what we know now. The endless pursuit of Diana by the press as seen in the film, and Charles and Diana's courtship and eventual marriage, has been usurped in real-life collective memory by so much more. In 2022 we know far less about their relationship than we do about (spoiler alert) their messy separation and divorce; her death and the fallout from it for the crown; the estrangement of their youngest son and his wife from the royal family, and the very publicly stated reasons for it; and a recent, rightly acclaimed film (2021's 'Spencer') of speculative fiction that, echoing her son and daughter-in-law's sentiments, applies them to her feelings and status in the institution, and the dissolution of the very marriage that concludes this TV movie. Why, for that matter - though it's gained ever more traction since the star couple's divorce, the acknowledgement of the heavily regimented and enforced life of the royals, of the pressures and demands and loss of self, is not new, and is even written into the screenplay here. But it's glossed over in light of the production's purpose, just as every idiosyncrasy that could possibly be perceived as weakness or a flaw is shoved down in the lives of these public figures.

If all these are too many words, however, then allow me to be more straightforward: the recognizable names in the cast pair with not so recognizable faces in the movie, because they scarcely look like themselves, and they are little more than living set pieces. There are details in the writing that do grab our attention, but often for the wrong reasons, and apart from carving out the broad strokes of the story much of the movie just feels empty and hollow. Editing and sequencing feel overzealous in putting together a feature that genuinely did not need to be made in the first place. 'Charles & Diana' was obviously greenlit, written, filmed, and wrapped with the utmost of haste, with little meaningful consideration for anything except the depiction through an audio-visual medium of a major news story. None of this is to say that the title is wholly without value - but it is value that's so small next to any other particular as to almost be rendered sterile.

If you can't get enough of the British royal family and everything about them, I suppose this could be the movie for you. Yet in its basic craft the film is sadly filled with shortcomings and faults that hamper what potential it could have had, to say nothing of subsequent history or the soulless aim behind its making. You could do a lot worse than 'A royal love story,' true, but whatever it is about the production that has drawn you in, the fact of the matter is that you could also do a lot better.