Glenn here. One of my favourite movie-going memories of 2013 was seeing the trailer for Adore play before a bemused sold out opening weekend audience at Blue Jasmine. Amongst the scattered laughs was one lady a row or two behind me who uttered to her companion, “What is Naomi Watts doing?” She, and the rest of us, are sadly still waiting for an answer. On the heels of that Oscar nomination for The Impossible, Watts has since appeared in two films that have literally been laughed off of cinema screens.
[Adore and Diana giggles after the jump...]
Not too many people actually saw Adore when it was released back in August, and for good reason: it was not good. In case you’re unaware, Adore is the film that features Watts and Robin Wright bonking each other’s’ sons. The distributor keenly changed the name after Sundance, presumably in the hope that audiences wouldn’t put two and two together. For as patently absurd as the movie sounds, it is in fact adapted from a well-received novella by Doris Lessing. And, let’s face it, when the sons are played by Xavier Samuel and James Frecheville (you’ll remember him from Animal Kingdom) it’s somewhat understandable. But Watts in particular gets some of the film’s worst moments as she’s forced to speak horrifying dialogue wherein she equates her own child to an otherworldly god or shrieking in horror, “He thinks we’re lesos?!?”
Still, at least in the case of Adore there was perhaps reason to expect something better. It was hardly in Watts’ crystal ball that director Anne Fontaine (Coco before Chanel) would play the film so straight and to such crippling effect. The film is laughable in many scenes, not least when the two young men compete to see who has the most sexual stamina with each other’s mother. Sadly, it’s never laughable enough and what could have been a deliciously preposterous erotic drama becomes a rather unsatisfying yawner with some good performances and accidental giggles to keep it afloat.
Much worse and much funnier, however, is Diana. The film was once-upon-a-time Watts’ prestige charge to Oscar glory -- British royalty! Biopic! Mimicry! Alas, the writing was well and truly on the wall long before its release into (scant) American theatres this past weekend.
Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian famously, and with hilariously un-PC relish, hailed Diana as “car crash cinema”, while Tim Robey’s piece in The Telegraph on the film’s ten most ridiculous moments well and truly sunk the nail into the coffin. My particular favourite moment was when Diana, curled up in bed with her lover (Lost’s Naveen Andrews sporting seriously unflattering hairstyling) watches the British elections. Upon seeing Tony Blair stride his way to victory, Diana remarks, “I like the way he walks. Like he’s crossing a bridge.” I watched all 113 minutes of Diana and I can’t make much sense of what that means so good luck to you readers who try it.
Diana is a film in which almost all narrative exposition is told through close-ups of newspaper headlines – “PEOPLE’S PRINCESS!” reads one in case you’d forgotten – and, most curiously, Diana’s personal acupuncturist. “Are you sure you should be going on holiday”, the acupuncturist asks on the eve of her fateful trip to Paris. I imagine it took every fibre of the screenwriter’s being to not have Watts’ Diana say, “I have a bad feeling about tonight, Dodi.” It’s The Rose without the drugs.
As directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel with all the style the Lifetime channel can afford and with all the dramatic thrust of a daytime soap opera, Diana is a big ol’ mess. I was so glad my opening night crowd – Nathaniel included – was willing to have a laugh. How about when Diana gets the hots for a doctor and orders a copy of Gray’s Anatomy sent to her palace? Or that wacky montage of Diana playing stalker housemaid in her boyfriend’s apartment? I nearly died of lulz when Diana wears a wig and walks through London incognito looking like she’s walked onto the set of a Pantene commercial to a flood of wolf-whistles and slack-jawed commoners. I couldn’t make this up if I tried. By the time Diana goes gay-clubbing to the sounds of the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" I began assuming the filmmakers actively hated their subject. I mean, they certainly present her as a deceiving, nosey manipulator and more than a little dim. When Diana asks her doctor boyfriend if “hearts can’t actually be broken” in that famously breathy plum accent, I can’t help but assume the writer’s thought she was genuine.
As the film’s greatest chance at best-worst movie immortality suggests: “If you can’t smell the fragrance, don’t come into the garden of love.” Judging by this weekend’s box office figures, people certainly could smell this one and from miles away. The more I write about it the more I am convinced that it's destined for camp classic status, although I admit that long stretches go by where not much of anything happens, funny or otherwise (so it has that in common with Troll 2).
Can Naomi Watts be saved from herself? She needs a new agent, for starters. That Oscar nomination for The Impossible doesn't really mean a lot when you're appearing in terrible films on both sides of it. Lest we forget her nothing part in Clint Eastwood's J Edgar, or the major role in one of Woody Allen's weakest You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and her other 2013 release, the appalling Movie 43 (4% on Rotten Tomatoes!). For her sake and ours, the best thing we can do is never mention it ever again.
