Grace of Monaco opened the 2014 Cannes Film Festivals, and mere hours after the first press screening critics are already panning the film.

Grace of Monaco is a fictionalized interpretation of Hollywood actress Grace Kelly’s troubled marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Nicole Kidman stars as Kelly in the film, which has already been fraught with controversy due to the creative liberties director Olivier Dahan and screenwriter Arash Amel took in recounting this piece of history.

The film has also been at the center of a conflict between Dahan and Grace of Monaco’s U.S. distributor Harvey Weinstein, who reportedly wanted Dahan to present a different cut of the film. Dahan reportedly wanted his film to have a dark, more sinister tone, while Weinstein insisted on a glossed over film. Critics of the film agree that the off-screen drama is far more interesting than what ended up onscreen.

“If only the movie were as theatrically tense as the vibes around it. Often silly but never vivacious, Grace of Monaco fails as either a stately drama of the BBC provenance or an entertainingly trashy tell-all. Arash Amel’s screenplay is replete with international politics… and palace intrigue… but the film is short on either insight or juice,” wrote Time reviewer Richard Corliss.

Critics agree that Grace of Monaco is too optimistic and lavish to truly expose the darker side of Kelly’s life as a royal, but too serious to be a fun royal drama.

Grace of Monaco opens with a Kelly quote: ‘The idea of my life as a fairy tale is itself a fairy tale.’ But instead of the implied debunking of glittering fakery, Dahan’s film merely replaces one simplistic, reverential façade with another. Indeed, the Shrek movies deconstruct fairy tale conventions with much more depth and wit than this dreary parade of lifeless celebrity waxworks. The real problem here is not the shameless blurring of fact and fiction, but how unforgivably dull it all seems,” writes Stephen Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter.

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Many were also quick to point out a key flaw in the script: the elaborate political conflict depicted in the film lies in a war of words between France and Monaco upon which rests the fate of rich tax evaders. The stakes, simply put, are not very high. The absence of compelling drama, writes Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, amounts to “a 104-minute Chanel ad, only without the subtlety and depth.”

Grace of Monaco will be screened again Thursday, May 15.

Olivia Truffaut-Wong

More on Cannes:

> Nicole Kidman Defends 'Grace of Monaco' At Cannes Premiere

> 'Grace Of Monaco' To Open Cannes Film Festival

> Competition Films: Jean-Luc Godard Returns To Cannes, Tommy Lee Jones Directs

> Quentin Tarantino To Host Special Screening Of 'A Fistful of Dollars'

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