Veteran actors make dumb movie bearable
“The King’s Daughter” has a script that reads like it was written in crayon by someone using only their thumbs, but two good performances make it watchable: Pierce Brosnan as King Louis XIV and William Hurt as his adviser and confessor, Pere Francois de La Chaise.
To be clear, these aren’t performances that belong on any awards shortlist. Rather, they’re examples of the strong work that capable actors do almost as a matter of course. They suggest life histories that otherwise aren’t there and provide meaning where it’s absent. They make up the difference between an audience’s caring or not caring, between scenes that are alive or dead.
Here’s one example. There’s a scene in which the king must tell a young woman that he is, in fact, her father — and then tell her that she has to marry some repellent young rich guy. So Brosnan, as he goes into the scene, knows that this is not going to be some uncomplicated father-daughter reunion. He knows he has to deliver good news followed by horrible news. So how does he do it?
The easy thing would be to harden himself and play the objective, “I need to force my daughter to marry the rich guy.” But he doesn’t do that. He’s king. He is sure that he is going to get his way. Instead, he plays a combination of dread at her disappointment and curiosity about her character. And he inflects all of this through an entire lifetime of selfishness, of never having to care about anybody else.
As for Hurt, he establishes as a throughline his concern for the king’s soul, which doesn’t translate into abstract spiritualism but as one man’s specific concern about another. Pere La Chaise — the famous Paris cemetery is named in his honor — likes and respects the king, knows his strengths and weaknesses, and fears that Louis has the capacity to go wrong in a big way.
Alas, Brosnan and Hurt are not the stars of “The King’s Daughter.” The star is Kaya Scodelario, who plays the title character,
Marie-josephe, a talented musician who is brought to serve in the king’s court, little suspecting that dad is sitting on the throne. Scodelario isn’t bad, either, but the story elements connected with her character are like a bad romance novel combined with fantasy.
It just so happens that when Marie-josephe arrives at court, something big is going on. The king’s sailors have captured a mermaid (Bingbing Fan plus computer graphics), and their big plan is to kill the mermaid in the expectation that her immortality will transfer to Louis XIV. You know how it is. Once a king gets too old to play James Bond, courtiers start worrying about their job security.
Meanwhile, Marie-josephe strikes up an interspecies friendship with the mermaid. In fact,
Marie-josephe goes for swims with the mermaid while never needing to come up for air, rather like Kevin Costner in “Waterworld.” The mermaid also heals Marie-josephe’s broken arm overnight using a healing life ray. Still, it never occurs to anybody at court that it would be a smart idea to keep this mermaid alive.
As dumb as “The King’s Daughter” is — and “dumb” is the accepted critical term for a movie like this — you will still end up caring about the mermaid, about Marie-josephe’s marital happiness, about her and her father’s relationship, and about the fate of Pere La Chaise.
But then, that’s what movies — not great or good movies, but
OK movies — get us to do. They make us genuinely care about dumb things.
Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Rating: PG (some violence).