Diana (2013) - Film Review

Starring: Naomi Watts & Naveen Andrews

Screenplay: Stephen Jeffreys

Directed By: Oliver Hirschbiegel

Certificate: 12

 

In Britain, we’ve seen many films that focus on the monarchy and their families, ranging from The King’s Speech, The Queen and The Madness of King George. Inevitably, we were going to end up getting a film about arguably one of the most loved women ever to walk the Earth: Princess Diana. Like The Queen, Diana details events that happened when either I wasn’t born, or I was too young to remember them, so I'm no expert in each film's events. But the crucial difference between the two, is that The Queen explains many details I might not have previously known, while Diana doesn’t even have the courtesy to bother.

 

Diana follows the last two years of Princess Diana’s life, the events that took place, her relationships and the events that led up to her tragic death in 1997. My personal knowledge of the Princess Diana’s life is average at best, especially considering the fact that Diana sadly died two years before I was born. However there are things that I do know about her, such as her children, her ex-husband, her relationship with the press, and how she died. But I'm no expert, and in the future, there will be people watching this film, and will know even less than I do. However, before watching Diana, you need to make sure that you know nearly EVERY aspect of the Princess’s life. That is no joke. The film does nothing to explain anything that you might not know. Going into this film, I didn't even know about Diana's affair with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, and for the first twenty minutes he was on screen, I did not know who he was, or why he belonged in this film. However, the absolute low-point of the film, is when it doesn’t even bother to tell us how Diana died. Again, that isn’t a joke. Yes, it’s true that nearly everyone knows how she died, but relying on your audience for real-life knowledge of events in your film is just lazy. While I wasn't exactly expecting the tragic car crash to be recreated, you at least needed another character to explain verbally what happened. Instead, Diana is there one minute and simply gone the next.

 

If there is anything salvageable in this train-wreck of a film, its Naomi Watts' portrayal of Princess Diana. You can definitely tell that Naomi has put a great deal of effort into the role here, as she gets the Princess’s mannerisms and speech down to a tee. However, this great performance crumbles in the moments that Diana shares with Hasnat, as there is no chemistry at all between the two; and the terribly-written dialogue they share is honestly painful to watch.

 

However, Naomi Watts' decent performance here is just wasted on the character that she’s playing. Diana in this film, is not the Princess Diana that everybody loved. The real Diana was one of the most loved women on Earth for a reason. However, the Diana that we see in this film, is nothing like her. Her motives and goals literally change from scene to scene. She constantly commits selfish actions towards others, and either never has to face the consequences of these actions, or she just ends up not caring. Some of her actions towards Hasnat are just horrible, and the two are constantly yo-yoing between being in and out of a relationship throughout the entire film. I’ve got very little to say about Hasnat Khan, because, like Diana, he’s been given little to no personality. Again, in the scenes on his own, Naveen Andrews does a decent job, but he spends the overwhelming majority of his screen time with Naomi Watts, and the two just don't convincingly portray a couple in love. I might have had more to say about his character if the film had bothered to give him a personality, or explain who he is, because, once again, before watching this film, I had literally never heard of him.

 

With a budget of just under $15,000,000, Diana is a fairly low-budget film. While tons of amazing films have been created on even smaller budgets, the cast and production values are terrible here. The use of colour varies very little, as the picture looks lifeless and dull nearly all the time, despite some wonderful locations. The colours and poor-looking sets make this feature-length film look like an insipid TV docudrama. This isn’t helped by the lacklustre direction from Oliver Hirschbiegel. At the start, the direction looks promising, but ten minutes in, the direction is either flat, clumsy or uninspiring. I’m honestly surprised considering the fantastic work that Oliver Hirschbiegel did on Downfall almost a decade ago. The cast and characters fare no better either. There are literally only two noteworthy characters here, and even they aren’t very deep or interesting: Diana and Hasnat. Although there are other characters present, they’re not even worth calling supporting cast members, such as the young Prince Harry and William, Diana’s children. Throughout the film, Diana goes on about wanting the best for her children, but they only appear in a scene that lasts about twenty seconds, and during this scene, there is no meaningful interaction between them. Simply put, the cast is smaller than a microbe, and it’s a problem when you consider how many people Diana loved, and how many people loved her in return.

 

Diana has a run time of nearly two hours and this two hours is torturous to sit and watch. The purpose of Diana seems to be to tell you a forbidden love story. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with a forbidden love story, it doesn’t and can’t work here, because the two lead characters are either bland or unlikeable. This film could have been so much better if it had focused on something else in the last two years of Diana’s life. The film could have instead focused on the relationship between Diana and the media. Depending on how it was handled, this could prove controversial, but so much better, and would have still been a relevant topic today, given the corruption that we still find in the media. In the film that we got, we see tiny glimpses of this, but not to the extent that it is sold in the trailers and the tiny scale of this film stops it being noteworthy or relevant.

 

If you haven't yet gathered, Diana is an absolutely terrible film, with its only strength being  the decent acting from Naomi Watts and Naveen Andrews. However, the oh-so-many cracks appear when the portrayal of the forbidden relationship is one where you'll struggle not to laugh, relying on the audience knowing EVERYTHING about Diana, stars a minuscule cast and features shoddy direction in an incredibly boring film. Put in its simplest form Diana is a waste of time, that should have been so, so much better. However, the only way you'd salvage something good from this is if you scrapped this and started again from scratch.

 

 

Diana



1/10