By focusing on the last two years in the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, this thin biopic sets before itself a difficult task: how to humanize someone who became an icon without the benefit of a lifelong survey. Though Diana succeeds in portraying its title character (played by Naomi Watts) as unmistakably human, there’s a distance between subject and audience the film doesn’t bridge. You might say it plays like a mostly tasteful, all-access version of one of those half-hour TV entertainment trifles or tabloids that found Diana so fascinating.
The movie establishes Diana’s decency and caring by touching on her crusade against landmines. But the film is focused mostly on her relationship with a Pakistani heart surgeon, Hasnat Khan, who is played by Naveen Andrews (Lost, The English Patient).
Oliver Hirschbiegel’s direction is too obvious in its reach for artiness. He moves forward in time through a series of very brief scenes, ones that neither set a mood nor tell a story, and that are mostly notable for their over-the-top sound editing (the act of lighting a match sounds like a thunder crack). Early on in the film, Hirschbiegel has Watts look directly into the camera in a tight shot. Watts’s eyes are piercing, but the "windows into her soul" effect Hirschbiegel was striving for doesn’t come off. When we see Diana, Dodi and their entourage enter the Paris elevator on the night she was killed in a car crash, we are afforded a view from the elevator security camera. It's a view that serves as a reminder of a pop culture moment, but makes no sense in context.
Diana is a series of repeated scenes — she and Hasnat in a postcoital embrace, followed by angry and tearful rows about how they can never be together because of the constant media intrusion. After she takes up with Dodi Fayed, son of an Egyptian billionaire, Diana is portrayed as an occasional manipulator of the paparazzi that follow her every move.
In the title role, Watts has moments when she accurately impersonates Diana’s facial expressions. But there’s nothing deeper to the portrayal. It’s not that the performance is bad. Rather, it’s that we come away with the opinion that Diana was a pretty, good-hearted and fairly uninteresting woman.
This article appears in Nov 7-13, 2013.