A true royal engagement

If you’re looking for something funny and fluffy to pass a rainy day away, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement will do very well. It promises nothing painfully ponderous, and it delivers the laughs, bundle after wholesome bundle.

Set five years after the first movie, The Princess Diaries 2 shows Princess Mia (Anne Hathaway) moving into Genovia to assume her royal duties. She is as clumsy as ever (falling into fountains, upsetting more than furniture, chasing chickens in the throne room, etc.) but also as beloved, both by her grandmother the Queen (Julie Andrews) and the people. She is genuinely concerned for the welfare of her subjects. The problem, however, is that Genovian law states that the princess must first be married before she can assume the throne. Princess Mia has 30 days to find herself a suitable match; otherwise, the throne goes to the next eligible heir, Nicholas (Chris Pine), nephew of the Viscount Marbrey and a true-blue Genovian. (Accept this Rumpelstiltskin premise and the movie takes smoothly off.)

She chooses Andrew Jacoby (Callum Blue), an English royal, from among a list of bachelors (Prince William is ineligible), and for a time all seems settled. Upsetting the arrangement, however, is that Mia’s rival to the throne looks like a cross between Rob Lowe and Brad Pitt. Inevitably, she falls in love with him. Although he is initially complicit in the plot to take the crown away from her reach, he eventually falls for her. The outcome of this is obvious even before the first 30 minutes of the movie are over, and is as satisfactory and satisfying as any offered by a fairy tale.

The movie, however, is too 21st century not to revise some fairy-tale assumptions. If the first Princess Diaries adds a "service clause" to the position of royalty, the sequel has a feminist coloring. Why cannot a woman rule a kingdom without a man? On the other hand, the movie also fosters the myth of "American exceptionalism" vis-à-vis "European decadence." It is the Americanized Mia who brings the supposedly more progressive American ways (including the expression "Shut up!") to a tradition-bound and (therefore) socially moribund Genovia (which, consistent with the idea, resembles those made-up tourist villages). Such a myth is cute in fiction, but in real life, as recent history shows, it can have disastrous consequences no Americanized princess, real or fictional, can undo.

Of course, the movie intends only to entertain, and we enjoy it the better by suspending ideological suspicions. Certainly, the gem in the crown is Julie Andrews as Queen Clarise, who has moved up the movie ladder. From playing nannies she now plays queen. Andrews is an icon of many "queens," who fondly mimic her mannerisms, and here she does not disappoint ("A queen is never late. The others are just early"). She is justly given more screen time and is at the moral center of the movie. The climactic wedding scene, where Mia makes her choice, belongs to her as much as Hathaway. As Mia asserts her values at the pulpit, Clarise adjusts hers on the aisle and finally walks down it with the man she loves.

If there is, too, a movie history highlight in The Princess Diaries 2, it is the shower scene in which Julie Andrews sings. Since her faulty throat operation, for which, in the opinion of many, her doctor ought to have been hanged, she has not recorded or sung. In Princess Diaries 2, we hear just a few bars–a little reminder of what was once the most silvery voice in cinema–but that is enough to justify the movie’s existence.

Don’t expect Princess Diaries 2 to receive nominations when award season comes next year (although Andrews might get a supporting actress notice), but if you want a movie that affirms the basic goodness of the universe and that provides laughter, refreshingly without referring to anything ribald or risqué, then the movie is indeed a royal engagement.