
Flicks, Leonie Hayden
As someone with the utmost aversion to body shaming and Hollywood beauty ideals, this is a hard one to frame but it has to be acknowledged that if you undertake to portray one of the most mesmerising beauties in all of film history, then certain expectations exist. One of them is not that a 33-year-old Grace Kelly will be portrayed by a middle-aged woman whose waxen death mask of a face has been paralysed into an approximation of youth. It’s unfair, but everything else hinges on the fact that if Kidman had dazzled, the rest of the film’s flaws would seem more forgivable. Instead her taut features fascinate, but in a distracting, Siamese-twin-foetus-in-a-jar kind of way.
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