The ang-'Di'-ety of influence.

A follow-up to our item on Newsweek's creepy alive-Diana cover: the "plot" of Ms. Brown's article, in which an aging Diana gets Botox and moves to New York, is like-but-unlike the plot of Monica Ali's new novel, Untold Story, in which an aging Diana dyes her hair and moves to the Midwest. It's been getting a lot of press, including the cover of this week's New York Times Book Review--perhaps Ms. Brown had heard of it before the writing process began.

Says a Newsweek publicist, via email: "Tina wrote the piece that appears as this week's Newsweek cover story as an updated preface to the UK edition of her 2007 NY Times best-seller -- The Diana Chronicles. She was not aware of Monica's novel but it is since cited in the copy."

We haven't yet read the Monica Ali novel, so we're not sure if the literary Diana beds a passel of Muslims and a late-night talk-show host, as does the Newsweek Diana. Talk about sliding doors! Not since Harry Potter has a British cutie launched so much fan fiction.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Perhaps us Americans don't care to quite the same extent - that is, unless you're jealous of Kate for bagging the man in line for the throne of England. Or, for that matter, jealous of Will for bagging Kate Middleton, the stunning 28-year-old former classmate of the prince's whose ubiquity is about to save the magazine industry. Just try not to buy a Harper's Bazaar with Kate on the cover. The wedding will take place at Westminster Abbey on April 29, 2011, and expect to be seeing a lot of Will & Kate leading up to then.

Anyway, Michael Calderone at The Cutline reports that the engagement was the most-covered event on broadcast networks this week, according to the Pew Reasearch Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The love fest took up 18 percent of the weekly newshole.

So what's the key takeaway here? Well, a lot of people saw Prince William admit to not knowing how long he'd been with Kate. That's what we call great television!

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

I’m not a big fan of dressing up like a prepped-out Hamptons dork.

Yet, there I was, sporting the obligatory blue blazer, linen shirt, khakis, and suede moccasins, desperately trying to fit in with the stuffy upper-crust crowd watching British scion Prince Harry take on Argentinean stud Nacho Figueras at the star-studded Veuve Clicquot Manhattan Polo Classic on Governor’s Island on Saturday afternoon, May 30.

It was glamorous. “It’s so lovely to see all these wonderful people dressed beautifully, ladies in hats,” said Mark Cornell, president and CEO of event sponsor Moet Hennessy and a dead ringer for the writer Christopher Hitchens.

It was exciting. “I love men who hit balls with sticks on islands off of Manhattan,” gushed the artist Dustin Yellin.

It was climactic. “Prince Harry! Sets up Revlich! And Revlich wins the game in the final seconds!” hollered the game’s announcer.

It was, in the words of writer Bob Morris, a “rubby” situation: “People feel that if they’re going to go to a polo match and then, on top of it, you have the imprimateur of Prince Harry, then they’ve rubbed up against privilege.”

And privilege was in plenty supply.

“I’m not witnessing a lot of recession suffering, that’s for sure,” said Mr. Morris, scanning the well-heeled crowd that afternoon. “I’m seeing the Hamptons moving into New York. I’m seeing a fuck-load of real estate that somebody must develop. I’m seeing a lot of well dressed people in need of a tab of ecstasy. You know what else it needs? Lily Allen walking around with a little potty mouth, drunk and insulting people.”

Earlier that morning, I had read all about Prince Harry’s hugely hyped U.S. visit in the New York Post, a trip culminating with the day’s looming polo match. He had schlepped up to Harlem, inspiring the kids with that common touch he inherited from his late mum, Princess Diana. What a role model!

This was the kinder, gentler Prince Harry, of course, a far cry from the pot-smoking, paparazzi-scuffling, Nazi-uniform-wearing royal pain in the arse that you read about in the British tabloids; the guy who once referred to a fellow solider serving in Afghanistan as a “raghead.”

In fact, that seemed to be the whole point of his visit; undoing his hard-earned bad-boy image.

“He’s doing a good job this week of doing all the right things, keeping a low profile,” David Lauren, son of Ralph and heir apparent to his father’s fashion empire, would tell me on the polo grounds later that afternoon; errant balls twice whizzing past us—one nearly decapitating some poor young woman in a big hat. “And he should stay low key for now, be understated. I think people are looking for him to be a good reflection of his country.”

I, too, tried to keep a low profile that afternoon. But it’s hard when you’re strapped with that all-important orange wristband. This was my golden ticket, entitling me to easier entry amid some super tight security and also allowing me the pleasure of briskly strolling past spectators in the general admission cheap seats. Commoners!

My ego soared all the way down an endless red carpet, fellow reporters and photographers roped off lest they invade my personal space with their microphones, recorders, stench.

I recognized a few comrades standing in the press line but didn’t nod, just kept staring straight ahead—hey, it is what it is, suckers, eat it!—waiting for a few camera clicks and inevitable whispers of “who’s he?”

Doesn’t happen. Suddenly, I heard someone excitedly say, “Are you Nacho’s sister?” Flashbulbs galore.

For the rest of the day, Mercedes Figueras, sister of Nacho, walked around saying, “I’m not your sister!”

Finally, I arrived at the VIP tent, where things quickly began to unravel. It seemed my hallowed orange wrist band no longer cut the mustard. I needed to fork over at least $1,000 (and up to $50,000) for a silver one to mingle with the A-listers.

Don’t you know who I am? An unwavering publicist pointed way off in the distance, where I was to spend the next five hours cooking in the sun. My heart sank as I watched some of the same journalists that I’d just been pitying get whisked right in. They saw me too. Ouch.

I guess that was part of the point of this whole extravaganza—to keep the prince away from fun-loving people like me.

Or Bungalow 8 owner Amy Sacco, for that matter, who later described her dream date with the dashing prince thusly: “I would kidnap him, give him a funny mustache, take him to a Rangers game, then to Patsy’s pizza in Brooklyn and off clubbing after, with Suzanne Bartsch, Kenny Kenny and Eric Conrad, then to La Esquina for breakfast burritos, before the tattoo parlor, then Bungalow 8 for a nightcap.”

Of course, Harry has a far less ambitious social secretary these days. After the match, he would be whisked back to England, long before the start of the official after-party later that night at Pink Elephant. (His absence partially explained the party’s lackluster turnout—the ubiquitous Byrdie Bell and her crew even failed to show up!  Another reason: “Pink Elephant is sooo 2005,” as one nonplussed attendee put it.)

Yet, relegated to the so-called “picnic area,” nursing some champagne against my gastroenterologist’s wishes (too gassy), I couldn’t help but envy Prince Harry. Guy’s got all the youth, fame, money he could ever want and unquestionably presides as grand marshal in a stunning parade of ass beyond my wildest dreams.

And look at me, middle aged, swatting bugs, getting sunburned, miserable, and all for naught. I might as well be sitting with the commoners across the field.

Incensed, I stormed over to make my case for inclusion to the VIP gatekeepers, one of whom eventually agreed to let me into the tent, just as soon as the prince arrived.

I turned around and, suddenly, there he was—the prince!—hair messy like he’d just woken up from a long nap, hands in his pockets, schlumpy, walking by with his mates. I overheard one guy ask him if he happened to know Alexandra so-and-so, probably some hot dame. The prince said he did not. What a player!

I tried to follow them inside but was barred yet again at the gate. This time, I was told I could finally join the party just as soon as the prince leaves.

Eventually, I made it inside, where it seemed the prince had left an indelible impression on New York celebs.

“You know what, I’m not much of a royal sort of watcher,” said the designer Marc Jacobs, wearing thick James Brown-style platform shoes. “It’s like, I’m a New Yorker and the royal family has never fascinated me so much. But I just got to meet him and I have to say he was immediately charming, what one would expect a prince to be, really, really cool, nice, friendly, very engaging, and cool. Seems like a good guy.”

What about his missteps?

“I think we all do missteps,” said developer Aby Rosen. “His are reported. Yours and mine are not reported. So that’s the only difference.”

Interview magazine publisher Peter Brant described the prince as a bold, aggressive and fearless polo player like his dad, Prince Charles.

What’s he got that I don’t have?

“He’s a prince,” Mr. Brant said. “You know how they say it’s nice to be king?”

Rapper LL Cool J said that Harry had gravitas, a generous spirit, and didn’t give off any airs. The bad boy stuff was a plus. “None of us are perfect, we all have flaws and I think the average person when they see royals they think of them as perfect and him having some flaws, that only makes him more human and more natural and we respect that,” he said.

At the bar, investment banker Euan Rellie declared it a great day to be British because of Harry who, despite those “very trivial missteps” a few years ago, had emerged as a real credit to his country. “The Nazi uniform thing wasn’t a great idea in retrospect,” Mr. Rellie said. “Not particularly proud of that one. But he’s okay, he was a kid. I made mistakes at age 35 that he made when he was 18 and thank God mine didn’t get into the newspaper!”

After ordering a grassy mallet, Mr. Rellie continued, “People here seem to have fallen under his spell and I think he’s got some of his mother’s fairy dust. He’s also well spoken, entirely authentic, and he has some of the best qualities of British people, in that he takes serious things sometimes rather lightly and light things rather seriously in a way. He’s doing good charity work and seems to enjoy himself, wears jeans with a rip in them which humanizes him and makes him convincing as a result, gives him added authority. He’s not overtrained or over polished and comes across very naturally.”

Earlier, Mr. Rellie had witnessed the prince asking the photographers to “cool it guys” when they were getting carried away. He found it charming and disarming.

“There’s a high glamour quotient but the other thing that he brings is a slightly informal way which again makes it even more sexy,” Mr. Rellie said. “Girls are certainly nuts about him. My wife is nuts about him and we’ve been married for seven years! Talk to Lucy.”

Lucy Sykes Rellie, wearing a white wavy hat, chic fitted dress, fabulous high sexy shoes, described Harry as the antithesis of the stuffy old royal, inheriting his mum’s common touch and natural charm.

She denied having a crush on the prince, however: “Noooo! Noooo. He’s like 20 years younger than me! But I was very, very impressed. I mean everyone, I looked around the room and they were all in tears.”

Actress Chloe Sevigny, dressed in an ensemble she described as “American Gigolo slash Great Gatsby,” sympathized with young Harry’s life under his overbearing handlers: “I think they’re keeping him caged in. Poor prince.”

With that, my envy went through the roof. I had spoken to Ms. Sevigny on a half dozen occasions over the years and always failed to impress her with my drunken inappropriate questions. Harry didn’t even have to go out to get the actress’s attention.

The writer Mr. Morris found this amusing: “Oh, oh, oh, you can’t, like, bother just, like, envying, I don’t know, Dana Vachon, something reasonable. You have to go for the prince, the thin prince. Nice idea, George. Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

The good vibe changed as soon as the pop star Madonna arrived with her kids and an entourage to rival the prince’s own massive security force.

Her bodyguards made sweeps, demanding to see wristbands, kicking people out of banquettes, all to make things safe and comfy for the most famous woman in the world. I overheard several revelers saying that she ruined everything.

For two hours, I had been free to roam the VIP tent but suddenly a security guy was on my case, too, demanding that I produce a silver wristband or leave. Somehow I slipped away but continued to fret about the inevitable hand on my shoulder. I prayed they’d be gentle about it and wouldn’t toss me out back by the porta potties.

As the polo match reached its dramatic conclusion, the Material Mom vaulted the VIP fence to get a closer look from the sidelines.

Why didn’t I think of that earlier?

The announcer boomed, “What a match, what a game, what a beautiful day! What a great day for charity! What a great day for polo!”

As Madonna climbed back over the fence to her banquette, she stumbled, fell forward and grabbed onto a tent pole, which came toppling down in the direction of her children. Miraculously, they were saved.

“I’ve had no champagne, officer,” she said, laughing.

With reporting by Caitlin Keating

As part of the continuing, formal inquest into the cause of the couple’s death, Ms. Goldsmith, 73, recalled an intimate conversation the two once had. “[Speculation of their engagement] had been splashed all over the papers. I said to her laughably, ‘You are not going to do anything silly are you?'” she recalled, clarifying: “I meant you are not going to do anything silly like rushing off and eloping or getting married and she said 'I would need marriage like a rash on my face.’”

Going on to snuff rumors that Diana was pregnant when she was killed, Ms. Goldsmith testified that that notion, too, is “impossible.” This belief, she said, is held because of something that happened when the Princess was visiting her home not long before her death—presumably something of a biological nature.

Today, at an inquest into Princess Diana’s death in 1997, Thomas Treasure, the former president of the European Association for Cardio-thoracic Surgery, said that the late monarch may have survived the high-speed crash in a Parisian tunnel had the medics at the site not wasted so much time. Mr. Treasure, speaking in London’s High Court, called the critical minutes in question (which may add up to a sum of 30) a “window of opportunity,” adding that the emergency crews did “very substantial good” when they first arrived on the scene of the crash. After the injured princess was loaded into the ambulance, however, Mr. Treasure testified that “opportunities were lost …When I pick through this with the benefit of hindsight [and ask], ‘Was this recoverable?’ The answer is yes, it just about was.”

Diana may have survived but for lost time, surgeon says [AFP]

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Tina Brown’s new biography of her apparent longtime girl crush, the doomed Princess of Wales, is that one doesn’t feel totally embarrassed reading it.

To some extent this is a feat of packaging. The book is meticulously endnoted and indexed. There are no photographs, save for a restrained black-and-white collage of Iconic Diana Moments spread across the endpapers, and a Vaseline-lensed Annie Leibovitz color portrait of Ms. Brown, in minimalist crisp shirt and pearl stud earrings, hand thoughtfully propping up cheek, on the back. The author’s name appears in sober, royal-purple capital letters, set against a vanilla background; her subject’s in a raised, Eloise at the Plaza–pink script, like icing on a birthday cake. Cosmetically at least, Ms. Brown’s latest Topic A, which has a bit of an irrelevant, fin-de-millénium feeling—rather like Ms. Brown herself—has been sufficiently freshened. But what about the substance?

It will be 10 years ago this August that New Yorkers awoke, somewhat quaintly in retrospect, to dramatic front-page newspaper reports that Princess Diana had perished alongside her then-boyfriend, Dodi al-Fayed, in a car accident in Paris. Their driver was measurably intoxicated, but because his passengers had been pursued by what Ms. Brown disdainfully terms “the farting motorbikes of the international press” (later she calls them “the furies”), the incident provoked one of those unbearable and completely ineffectual media mea culpa marathons, with earnest panels on CNN, George Clooney’s head bobbing indignantly in frame, etc.

Since then, the paparazzi have only grown more vigorous (see Us Weekly, TMZ.com and the like). The monarchy is another matter. To assess how far they’ve fallen in public esteem, one need only compare Stanley Donen’s 1951 movie musical Royal Wedding, in which the nuptials of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were but a respectful backdrop, to Stephen Frears’ high-beam 2006 biopic The Queen, which—let’s admit it—would’ve been entirely appropriate programming for the Lifetime channel, despite the accolades for its star (a dame of the British Empire) from the notoriously Anglophiliac Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The reality TV show careers of Paul Burrell, Diana’s butler of betrayal, and James Hewitt, her cavalry man turned chatty lover, suggest further that the entire apparatus supporting the royal family—or as Ms. Brown is fond of calling it, The Firm—might some day crumble under the giant wrecking ball of cheap fame. Even since—especially since—Prince Charles and his longtime mistress Camilla Parker Bowles married and settled into a comfortable, quiet life of unleashing the hounds, eating kippers, striding the moors and whatever else it is upper-crust Brits do, the principals have seemed decidedly vestigial, out-of-touch, superfluous: museum pieces, under glass.

Diana was different, as Ms. Brown tells us—not for the first time, God knows, but with a certain metropolitan elegance and assertiveness that manages to make the story seem passably absorbing again. Diana was noisy: bopping around listening to pop tunes on her Walkman; giggling with Sarah Ferguson, former Duchess of York, the lesser casualty of the famous Windsor hauteur; or barfing up her frequent food binges (Ms. Brown lingers with peculiar savor on this topic, pointing out how “Buckingham Palace was tailor-made for a bulimic outburst. It is suffocating and empty at the same time,” and deeming Balmoral, the royal retreat, a “dank vomitorium”). Diana was touchy-feely: affectionate toward her two young sons in public, sympathetic to orphans and AIDS patients and victims of land-mine explosions. Diana could also be a little bit trashy—hey, kind of like Tina Brown at The New Yorker, that monarch of magazines, which many felt was becoming an out-of-touch museum piece until she ruffled up its pages.

Also, Diana was pretty, though many a little girl, woken up early to watch her walk down the aisle, wondered why this so-called princess didn’t grow her golden hair long, like they do in the storybooks. Indeed, author and subject were eerie partners in coif for many years, and Ms. Brown is still working a variation of the cropped, feathery, frosted do, perhaps in memoriam. Repeatedly she pays tribute to Diana’s terrific gams, fine teeth, great skin. “Softer than a child’s velveteen rabbit,” Tina croons about that English-rose complexion, which she appears to have all but stroked at a Four Seasons luncheon with Vogue’s Anna Wintour, not long before Di’s death. “No wonder she made such an impact at the bedsides of sick children.”

This is the essence of what Tina Brown brings to the groaning table of literature on Diana, Princess of Wales: the presence of Tina Brown, editor in chief. Here she is during her New Yorker stint, sitting near a knuckle-cracking Charles at a performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Cerritos, Calif.—the perfect T.B. meeting of high and low. (“They’re strange, aren’t they, in L.A.?” the Prince mused endearingly. “I mean, they all want to go to bed at 9.”) Here she is summoning outtakes from a long-ago Tatler photo shoot she supervised at the Parker Bowles’ home: Camilla’s husband Andrew, Tina reports, “spent the whole shoot staring at my chest.” (So Di isn’t the only one with delicious décolletage.) Here she is braving the harsh reaction from The Daily Mail (“How Would Tina and Harry’s Marriage Stand Up to the Vanity Fair Treatment?”) to her gossipy VF story about the royals.

But despite these glory days, it’s actually the mantle of the failed Talk magazine that clings most tenaciously to Ms. Brown—there may be no references to “the conversation” and “the buzz” in The Diana Chronicles, but there is one to “Diana synergy.” Somehow providing sporadic analyses of phenomena like the “bewilderingly promiscuous” British press and the “gossip industry” grants her license to hold herself aloof from the Fleet Streeters of this world—the Andrew Mortons, Kitty Kelleys and Martin Bashirs—even as she relies heavily on their reportage and their methods. At one point, Ms. Brown, who herself makes liberal use of anonymous sources, compares Mr. Morton, who was practically Di’s official confidant, to Bob Woodward.

Tina has people like John Travolta pop in for on-the-record chitchats, lest we forgot for a moment that she still has the potentates of P.M.K. on her speed dial. And the material she gathered from nameless sources clearly required no sordid assignations in darkened parking garages. She was well taken care of on her research trips to London: Ian Schrager made a room available for her every time she hit town “at his fabulous Sanderson Hotel in Berners Street,” Ms. Brown boasts in her acknowledgements. God forbid she should stay at a Hilton.

Alexandra Jacobs is editor at large at The Observer.

Mr. Frears and Mr. Morgan have chosen to place Helen Mirren’s super-Oscar-worthy Queen Elizabeth II in the curiously sympathetic role of an upholder of tradition against the media-driven hysteria of celebrity worship. What makes Ms. Mirren’s lively and lucid incarnation of the real-life dowdy queen so remarkable is that she is pitted against the real-life glamorous media mythology of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who in death is even more in command of the country’s devotion than she was in life. And, in my opinion, at least, Elizabeth comes out on top.

Since Robert Gottlieb confessed his prejudice against the royals because of his being “an unreconstructed American republican” in his fascinating article on the Diana-Elizabeth duel in last week’s Observer, I must be equally candid in tracking my own monarchist predilections to my parents. They came to the United States from two small villages in Greece—one near Sparta (my mother) and one near Kalamata (my father)—on the Peloponnesian peninsula, a royalist stronghold of King Constantine against the anti-monarchist Venizelos government back in my mom and dad’s time. This royalist childhood orientation has put me at odds politically with all the Greek-Americans I have ever met.

In his brief comments on the movie The Queen, Mr. Gottlieb mentions a scene in which Elizabeth shoos away a majestic stag from the oncoming yelps of the royal hunting hounds, and he proceeds to dismiss it as “the Oscar moment.” A subsequent scene in which Elizabeth sees that the stag has been slain, and its head and antlers detached from the stag’s carcass for mounting, is interpreted by Mr. Gottlieb as the movie’s simplistic reminder to Elizabeth that Diana, too, is dead and deserving of some compassion. What impressed me about the second sequence is that Elizabeth does not seize the opportunity to gain sympathy with the audience by scolding the royal steward of the hunt for killing Bambi. She instead has too much respect for the feelings of her loyal servant to grandstand for the animal lovers. After all, it is supposed to be her film, not Diana’s.

Mr. Frears and Mr. Morgan show a singularly fair-minded approach to the conflict that arises between Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street during the week in 1997 after Princess Diana died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel, and just about the same time that Tony Blair brought the Labor Party to power in a national election. Some reviewers have claimed that James Cromwell’s Prince Philip and Alex Jennings’ Prince Charles have been hilariously caricatured. But, for the most part, I didn’t recognize either the hilarity or the caricature. A tall man like Mr. Cromwell in kilts doesn’t strike me as automatically funny, and after all the jokes I’ve heard over the years at the expense of the royals, I thought that neither Philip nor Charles were unfairly presented—perhaps because I sympathized with their exasperation over all the fuss that Diana’s death was causing. Apropos, at the screening I attended at the Lincoln Plaza, a near-riot ensued when two ultra-sophisticated women kept giggling at everyone in the movie, even the newsreel appearances of a radiantly smiling Princess Diana. “Are you animals?” one patron hissed. “Have you no shame?” said another. Apparently, the mourning for Princess Diana continues for some people.

For the most part, however, the bulk of the audience did not react to the picture as if it were a satirical farce, partly because Michael Sheen bore such a striking resemblance to the real-life media-saturated Tony Blair that the whole film took on the authenticity of a documentary. Mr. Blair is shown here at his political sunrise, so to speak, bringing the Labor Party to power with promises of a progressive resurgence after the Thatcher years of Conservative regression. Even the monarchy was subject to reform if not outright abolition, as Mr. Blair’s wife, Cherie, saucily played by Helen McCrory, clearly preferred. The delicacy with which Mr. Frears directs Mr. Blair’s first audiences with the Queen—first alone, and then alongside his wife—establishes a bond of respect and affection between the prime minister and the Queen. These scenes could easily have been played for laughable displays of pomposity, but Ms. Mirren and Mr. Sheen never allow that to happen by keeping the Queen and the prime minister resolutely and realistically human despite the inescapable awkwardness of their first encounter. As it turns out, Mr. Blair is more a student of history than his wife—he appreciates, as she does not, the fearsome obstacles faced and overcome by Elizabeth from her accession to the throne at a youthful age to the present.

Indeed, when she is finally forced by the sustained hysteria of the press and the populace over Diana’s demise to acknowledge the veritable ocean of flowers and laurel wreaths in front of a gate at Buckingham Palace, she provides another “Oscar moment”—this by accepting, at first unbelievingly and then gratefully, a bouquet of flowers from a little girl meant not for Diana, but for the Queen.

Ms. Mirren’s crowning moment as Elizabeth occurs in a perceptively written confrontation with the self-satisfied prime minister, in which she begs to differ with his assessment of her intervention on Diana’s behalf as a victory for the monarchy. She corrects Mr. Blair by deeming her acknowledgment of the people’s grief “a humiliation.” And then she tells him that he will someday understand her feeling when he tastes defeat.

Of course, we in the audience know, as do Mr. Frears and Mr. Morgan, that Prime Minister Tony Blair is now experiencing the sunset of his political career almost 10 years after Elizabeth’s “humiliation” on the screen.

Finally, I do not agree with one of my esteemed colleagues that The Queen doesn’t belong in the New York Film Festival because its selections should be confined to difficult foreign-language films in more need of public exposure. While I agree that The Queen is not difficult, it is sufficiently and, yes, marvelously artistic enough to qualify for inclusion.

Besides, Mr. Frears, now 65, has been in the movie business for close to 40 years, mostly making very highly regarded British television movies that have never been released here. Still, in the theatrical films we have been privileged to see, he has displayed an auteurist flair for cutting-edge subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Among his poetically pungent entertainments from Britain are Gumshoe (1971), Bloody Kids (1979), The Hit (1984), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Prick Up Your Ears and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (both 1987), The Snapper (1993) and Liam (2000). In the U.S., he has scored with The Grifters (1990), Hero (1992), Mary Reilly (1996) and High Fidelity (2000). Perhaps the time has come to say thank you for Mr. Frears, and opening night at the 44th Annual

Joyless

Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, from a screenplay by Jonathan Raymond and Ms. Reichardt, based on a short story by Mr. Raymond, plays out its minimalist plot and brief (76 minutes) running time in a skeletally articulated mood of universal alienation. There are basically only two characters, Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham)—three, if you count Mark’s pregnant wife Tanya (Tanya Smith). Mark and Tanya are seen briefly in their home in Portland, Ore., when Mark receives a call from his old college friend Kurt, and agrees to go with him on a weekend camping trip to the Cascade Range in Oregon. Up to that point, Mark and Tanya had been busy non-communicating, but she suddenly conveys by her negative expression that she doesn’t think much of the idea. Indeed, she makes her first entrance by virtually flaunting her pregnancy with a defiantly thrust-out stomach. (I suppose that can be considered time-saving visual exposition.) Mark whines a bit about not wanting to make her unhappy, and the next thing we know, he is loading some supplies into his Volvo station wagon as well as his dog, who seems excited about going on the trip.

But once Mark picks up his old chum Kurt in front of the Portland apartment in which Kurt is crashing temporarily, Mark becomes all business behind the wheel, keeping his eyes on the road and letting Kurt do all the talking. He also seems impervious to all the scenic spectacles unfolding through the car windows. Meanwhile, Kurt is trying to re-establish their old hippie relationship with bits and pieces of crackerjack philosophizing, including a scene from one of his dreams in which a woman hugs him and provides him—and the audience—with an explanation of the film’s title: “Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy.”

Instead of responding to Kurt’s conversational gambits, Mark turns on the radio periodically to his favorite station, which carries the liberal radio network Air America and its favorite message, the decline and fall of America under George Bush—a subject with which I am in total agreement, but not when it’s used as a substitute for character-developing dialogue. I am informed that Ms. Reichardt’s two previous films consist, like Old Joy, of endless shots of landscapes glimpsed through the passenger-seat window of a moving car. I have not seen either River of Grass (1994) or Ode (1999), and so I cannot construct an auteurist context for Ms. Reichardt’s despairing directorial personality, as Dave Kehr has done so elegantly and so eloquently in the September/October 2006 Film Comment.

After many false starts, Mark and Kurt reach their destination, a seemingly well-hidden and seldom-frequented natural hot-springs facility. When both men undress and get into separate tubs, and Kurt begins massaging Mark’s back, I couldn’t help thinking that they had been heading for Brokeback Mountain all along. But that’s just me; I have never had the slightest desire to go camping with anyone else, male or female. Apparently nothing “happens,” and the two men return to Portland with no hope of ever reconciling. Mark will presumably resume his middle-class existence as a husband and father, and Kurt will continue on his bohemian path. Some reviewers have suggested that it is Mark who has failed some sort of test meant to broaden his narrow bourgeois outlook. But if our society is in decline-and-fall mode, as Ms. Reichardt seems to suggest, are middle-aged hippies likelier to be happy than their conventional middle-class former friends, now saddled with family responsibilities? For that matter, how can one measure degrees of joy, old or new? Mark is simply too undefined a character even to begin answering that question. Let us say simply that Ms. Reichardt’s brand of minimalism leaves me truly joyless.

Mr. Frears and Mr. Morgan have chosen to place Helen Mirren’s super-Oscar-worthy Queen Elizabeth II in the curiously sympathetic role of an upholder of tradition against the media-driven hysteria of celebrity worship. What makes Ms. Mirren’s lively and lucid incarnation of the real-life dowdy queen so remarkable is that she is pitted against the real-life glamorous media mythology of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who in death is even more in command of the country’s devotion than she was in life. And, in my opinion, at least, Elizabeth comes out on top.

Since Robert Gottlieb confessed his prejudice against the royals because of his being “an unreconstructed American republican” in his fascinating article on the Diana-Elizabeth duel in last week’s Observer, I must be equally candid in tracking my own monarchist predilections to my parents. They came to the United States from two small villages in Greece—one near Sparta (my mother) and one near Kalamata (my father)—on the Peloponnesian peninsula, a royalist stronghold of King Constantine against the anti-monarchist Venizelos government back in my mom and dad’s time. This royalist childhood orientation has put me at odds politically with all the Greek-Americans I have ever met.

In his brief comments on the movie The Queen, Mr. Gottlieb mentions a scene in which Elizabeth shoos away a majestic stag from the oncoming yelps of the royal hunting hounds, and he proceeds to dismiss it as “the Oscar moment.” A subsequent scene in which Elizabeth sees that the stag has been slain, and its head and antlers detached from the stag’s carcass for mounting, is interpreted by Mr. Gottlieb as the movie’s simplistic reminder to Elizabeth that Diana, too, is dead and deserving of some compassion. What impressed me about the second sequence is that Elizabeth does not seize the opportunity to gain sympathy with the audience by scolding the royal steward of the hunt for killing Bambi. She instead has too much respect for the feelings of her loyal servant to grandstand for the animal lovers. After all, it is supposed to be her film, not Diana’s.

Mr. Frears and Mr. Morgan show a singularly fair-minded approach to the conflict that arises between Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street during the week in 1997 after Princess Diana died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel, and just about the same time that Tony Blair brought the Labor Party to power in a national election. Some reviewers have claimed that James Cromwell’s Prince Philip and Alex Jennings’ Prince Charles have been hilariously caricatured. But, for the most part, I didn’t recognize either the hilarity or the caricature. A tall man like Mr. Cromwell in kilts doesn’t strike me as automatically funny, and after all the jokes I’ve heard over the years at the expense of the royals, I thought that neither Philip nor Charles were unfairly presented—perhaps because I sympathized with their exasperation over all the fuss that Diana’s death was causing. Apropos, at the screening I attended at the Lincoln Plaza, a near-riot ensued when two ultra-sophisticated women kept giggling at everyone in the movie, even the newsreel appearances of a radiantly smiling Princess Diana. “Are you animals?” one patron hissed. “Have you no shame?” said another. Apparently, the mourning for Princess Diana continues for some people.

For the most part, however, the bulk of the audience did not react to the picture as if it were a satirical farce, partly because Michael Sheen bore such a striking resemblance to the real-life media-saturated Tony Blair that the whole film took on the authenticity of a documentary. Mr. Blair is shown here at his political sunrise, so to speak, bringing the Labor Party to power with promises of a progressive resurgence after the Thatcher years of Conservative regression. Even the monarchy was subject to reform if not outright abolition, as Mr. Blair’s wife, Cherie, saucily played by Helen McCrory, clearly preferred. The delicacy with which Mr. Frears directs Mr. Blair’s first audiences with the Queen—first alone, and then alongside his wife—establishes a bond of respect and affection between the prime minister and the Queen. These scenes could easily have been played for laughable displays of pomposity, but Ms. Mirren and Mr. Sheen never allow that to happen by keeping the Queen and the prime minister resolutely and realistically human despite the inescapable awkwardness of their first encounter. As it turns out, Mr. Blair is more a student of history than his wife—he appreciates, as she does not, the fearsome obstacles faced and overcome by Elizabeth from her accession to the throne at a youthful age to the present.

Indeed, when she is finally forced by the sustained hysteria of the press and the populace over Diana’s demise to acknowledge the veritable ocean of flowers and laurel wreaths in front of a gate at Buckingham Palace, she provides another “Oscar moment”—this by accepting, at first unbelievingly and then gratefully, a bouquet of flowers from a little girl meant not for Diana, but for the Queen.

Ms. Mirren’s crowning moment as Elizabeth occurs in a perceptively written confrontation with the self-satisfied prime minister, in which she begs to differ with his assessment of her intervention on Diana’s behalf as a victory for the monarchy. She corrects Mr. Blair by deeming her acknowledgment of the people’s grief “a humiliation.” And then she tells him that he will someday understand her feeling when he tastes defeat.

Of course, we in the audience know, as do Mr. Frears and Mr. Morgan, that Prime Minister Tony Blair is now experiencing the sunset of his political career almost 10 years after Elizabeth’s “humiliation” on the screen.

Finally, I do not agree with one of my esteemed colleagues that The Queen doesn’t belong in the New York Film Festival because its selections should be confined to difficult foreign-language films in more need of public exposure. While I agree that The Queen is not difficult, it is sufficiently and, yes, marvelously artistic enough to qualify for inclusion.

Besides, Mr. Frears, now 65, has been in the movie business for close to 40 years, mostly making very highly regarded British television movies that have never been released here. Still, in the theatrical films we have been privileged to see, he has displayed an auteurist flair for cutting-edge subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Among his poetically pungent entertainments from Britain are Gumshoe (1971), Bloody Kids (1979), The Hit (1984), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Prick Up Your Ears and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (both 1987), The Snapper (1993) and Liam (2000). In the U.S., he has scored with The Grifters (1990), Hero (1992), Mary Reilly (1996) and High Fidelity (2000). Perhaps the time has come to say thank you for Mr. Frears, and opening night at the 44th Annual

Joyless

Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, from a screenplay by Jonathan Raymond and Ms. Reichardt, based on a short story by Mr. Raymond, plays out its minimalist plot and brief (76 minutes) running time in a skeletally articulated mood of universal alienation. There are basically only two characters, Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham)—three, if you count Mark’s pregnant wife Tanya (Tanya Smith). Mark and Tanya are seen briefly in their home in Portland, Ore., when Mark receives a call from his old college friend Kurt, and agrees to go with him on a weekend camping trip to the Cascade Range in Oregon. Up to that point, Mark and Tanya had been busy non-communicating, but she suddenly conveys by her negative expression that she doesn’t think much of the idea. Indeed, she makes her first entrance by virtually flaunting her pregnancy with a defiantly thrust-out stomach. (I suppose that can be considered time-saving visual exposition.) Mark whines a bit about not wanting to make her unhappy, and the next thing we know, he is loading some supplies into his Volvo station wagon as well as his dog, who seems excited about going on the trip.

But once Mark picks up his old chum Kurt in front of the Portland apartment in which Kurt is crashing temporarily, Mark becomes all business behind the wheel, keeping his eyes on the road and letting Kurt do all the talking. He also seems impervious to all the scenic spectacles unfolding through the car windows. Meanwhile, Kurt is trying to re-establish their old hippie relationship with bits and pieces of crackerjack philosophizing, including a scene from one of his dreams in which a woman hugs him and provides him—and the audience—with an explanation of the film’s title: “Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy.”

Instead of responding to Kurt’s conversational gambits, Mark turns on the radio periodically to his favorite station, which carries the liberal radio network Air America and its favorite message, the decline and fall of America under George Bush—a subject with which I am in total agreement, but not when it’s used as a substitute for character-developing dialogue. I am informed that Ms. Reichardt’s two previous films consist, like Old Joy, of endless shots of landscapes glimpsed through the passenger-seat window of a moving car. I have not seen either River of Grass (1994) or Ode (1999), and so I cannot construct an auteurist context for Ms. Reichardt’s despairing directorial personality, as Dave Kehr has done so elegantly and so eloquently in the September/October 2006 Film Comment.

After many false starts, Mark and Kurt reach their destination, a seemingly well-hidden and seldom-frequented natural hot-springs facility. When both men undress and get into separate tubs, and Kurt begins massaging Mark’s back, I couldn’t help thinking that they had been heading for Brokeback Mountain all along. But that’s just me; I have never had the slightest desire to go camping with anyone else, male or female. Apparently nothing “happens,” and the two men return to Portland with no hope of ever reconciling. Mark will presumably resume his middle-class existence as a husband and father, and Kurt will continue on his bohemian path. Some reviewers have suggested that it is Mark who has failed some sort of test meant to broaden his narrow bourgeois outlook. But if our society is in decline-and-fall mode, as Ms. Reichardt seems to suggest, are middle-aged hippies likelier to be happy than their conventional middle-class former friends, now saddled with family responsibilities? For that matter, how can one measure degrees of joy, old or new? Mark is simply too undefined a character even to begin answering that question. Let us say simply that Ms. Reichardt’s brand of minimalism leaves me truly joyless.

With Kirsten Dunst as a naïve, thumb-sucking 14-year-old virgin plucked from Austria in 1768 to become the child bride of a near-catatonic French monarch she’s never met, and limburger-faced Jason Schwartzman as a clumsy, moronic King Louis XVI, the plot ends faster than you can say “Quel fromage!” The next 123 minutes is nothing more than eye candy with rock ’n’ roll. There’s enough fey chintz to stock the D & D Building, enough gold leaf to open 10 frame shops, and enough French pastry to turn you into a carnivore. The overwrought director sees Marie as France’s most misunderstood monarch, but provides nary one sane member of the court who misunderstands her. Everyone at Versailles is so self-absorbed with gossip, conspiracy and scandal, and so stuffed with Napoleons, brioches, éclairs and cream-filled canapés, that there’s nothing for a lonely, bored and nougat-brained little myth-in-the-making to do in order to fill her miserable hours but trade barbs with the treacherous Madame du Barry, throw lavish costume balls, play cards, munch candied violets and shop for shoes at the 18th-century version of Payless. Her marriage is a business alliance for purely political reasons that she doesn’t even begin to comprehend; her marriage isn’t even consummated for seven years. With the hairy, powdered-wig Mr. Schwartzman playing Louis XVI like Elmer Fudd in drag, it’s no wonder Marie escapes to the bed of an oversexed Swedish count and a country farm where even the rutting pigs remind her what she’s been missing. By the time she manages to miraculously produce an heir, empty the treasury with her gambling debts, and defiantly declare that she never said “Let them eat cake!”, you’ll be praying for the angry, starving mob of peasants to start the French Revolution and drag her off in a tumbrel.

For a long and exhausting movie that shows extended details of everything from palace protocol to the number of eggs Marie’s barnyard chickens lay at the Petit Trianon, it is positively amazing that there isn’t a single shot of the guillotine. What you do get is an avalanche of white chocolate. Marie Antoinette is too over-the-top to be considered an amuse-bouche, but there’s such a void at the center you couldn’t call it la grande bouffe, either. It’s like a chocolate truffle with nothing inside. And there really is an extended sequence of enough candy, confectioner’s sugar and chantilly to make you retch. There’s a lot to look at, but the excess exudes a preciousness that becomes cloyingly nauseous.

Defending the negative bruising she’s getting, Ms. Coppola has gone on the record to state that she didn’t want to make a dry, historical period tableau, but designed the movie “to let the audience feel what it might be like to be in Versailles during that time and to really get lost in that world.” The result is a laughable self-indulgence in which the audience gets lost in translation, all right. If the members of the French court had truly been forced to listen to Adam and the Ants and “Fools Rush In” by Bow Wow Wow, the Revolution would have started a lot sooner.

Queen Sweeps

Movies about queens with their crowns on crooked are suddenly the rage, but as silly and pretentious as Marie Antoinette is, the wonderful British film The Queen gets it right. Directed by the excellent Stephen Frears, with a memorable screenplay by Peter Morgan, the extraordinary writer of The Last King of Scotland, this is a reverent, intelligent and responsible look at what went on behind the closed doors of Buckingham Palace in the troubled aftermath of Princess Diana’s death. It is not a documentary, but Helen Mirren’s majestic performance as H.R.H. Queen Elizabeth is real, detailed and authentic-looking. It looks right, sounds right and has a stamp of truth that is practically unheard of in a fictional account of events usually reserved for documentary filmmaking. It’s a stunning and perceptive work of integrity that is rare for a film of any kind.

From the fatal crash in Paris on Aug. 30, 1997, that deeply altered a saddened world’s opinion of the royal family, to the Queen’s reluctant surrender to public pressure to stage (and attend) a public funeral for Diana at Westminster Abbey, the film chronicles the quiet turbulence inside Buckingham Palace in the hours following the earth-shaking news, sparing no details, from the Queen’s efforts to cope with damage control and protect her grandsons from excessive grief to her tense and suspicious relationship with her new prime minister, Tony Blair, who had only been in office three months at the time of Diana’s death. Hounded by the press, criticized by her own subjects, a victim of both sympathy and hostility, the Queen stuck by her controversial decision to make no public statement and exhibited the traditional values of procedure and protocol that she had been taught since her coronation at age 25. The film takes no sides, quoting Princess Margaret on Diana (“More trouble dead than alive”) and Tony Blair on the royals (“Will someone please save these people from themselves?”), even questioning the relevance of the monarchy altogether (especially in the eyes of Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie). Prince Philip (James Cromwell) is the biggest fool of all, an impotent figurehead with no power and a hypocrite as well (judgmental about Diana but no stranger to adultery himself), and Prince Charles (warm and sustaining work by Alex Jennings) is the biggest surprise, revealing maturity, sensitivity and vision when the chips are down.

No whitewash here. Philip is vulgar and prejudiced; the tipsy Queen Mum (Sylvia Syms) is never far from her Baccarat tumbler of hundred-year-old booze. Elizabeth retreats from the scandal to the 40,000-acre Balmoral estate, driving her Range Rover through the rocky streams and muddy roads of Scotland, talking on her cell phone and spitting out the occasional “Bugger it!” But while she remains above the fray and beyond the public clamor for her head on a platter, her emotions surface in intimate moments that are heartbreaking. Her stoicism in the face of international mourning leads to a constitutional crisis that forces her to break the rules and fly the flag at half-mast above the palace, even though she is not in residence. By this time, you feel the conflict of a woman, a mother and a ruler with a heart. Mr. Frears’ careful direction, Mr. Morgan’s balanced screenplay and Ms. Mirren’s considered performance play fair with both sides of a difficult equation.

Showing the differences between inherited power and elected power in modern times that redefine the importance of the throne, this is one of the best British films in years. Who knows for certain the truths, half-truths or embellishments of artistic license? Was Philip really mortified by the guest list and the presence of Elton John singing in Westminster Abbey? In their royal bedroom chamber, does Philip really thwack the Queen on the rump and call her “Cabbage”? And did Her Majesty really change her mind about Diana after her Land Rover broke down in a remote glen and she came face to face with a brave stag marked for death in a hunt? The beautiful, defiant stag seems a bit forced and overly symbolic. Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair is distinctive, but such an awed and naïve puppy when he first meets the salty Queen that his gradual respect and adoration of her later on is not entirely convincing. Was it really Blair who forced her to knuckle under to the tabloid frenzy outside the palace door, appear on live TV and show public remorse on CNN?

Never mind. When I think what sentimental tripe The Queen could have been in the hands of amateurs, I bow in gratitude to all concerned. Especially to Helen Mirren, who never surrenders to parody or satire, but grafts a seriousness of purpose to her portrait of a queen that is positively triumphant. Instead of a colorful caricature, she peels Queen Elizabeth like an onion, keeping your curiosity about her growing without ever diminishing her importance. Refined, restrained, dignified, illustrious and unexpectedly compassionate, this is a performance of overwhelming magnitude. From whores to homicide cops to the queens of England, Ms. Mirren has always sought perfection in a gamut of assignments. With this amazing piece of social and cultural history, she achieves it.

Blonde Blunder

Any new cabaret season would ordinarily be off to a peppy start with an appearance by perennial blond favorite KT Sullivan, but the idea of teaming her up with saloon crooner Allan Harris at the Algonquin’s Oak Room to celebrate the songs of Duke Ellington and Johnny Mercer does none of them any favors. The sophistication of Mr. Ellington’s urban Harlem jazz and the brilliant but down-home country gingham and moonlight of Mr. Mercer’s lyrics have little in common besides musical excellence, and KT’s lilting soprano is jarringly mismatched with Mr. Harris’ melting baritone. She’s an effervescent Broadway baby, better suited to show tunes; he’s a saloon singer from the Nat King Cole school, more at ease in a jazz lounge. In this uneasy “act” that runs through Oct. 14, they both seem uncomfortable in their struggle to reach a truce: like Israel meets Palestine, with piano, bass and drums.

KT, who has charm to spare, was better matched with her ex-partner Mark Nadler, and now finds herself so miscast in ridiculous choices like “Drop Me Off in Harlem” that she has trouble suppressing the urge to laugh. Mr. Harris, who has more of a sense of time and blues phrasing, is better cast in the role of an Ellington interpreter, but has no charm at all. The result is very odd indeed. To make up for being on the wrong stage in the wrong show, KT adjusts her usual front-and-center operetta style and lowers her voice on ballads to blend better with his, but she does it with clinched teeth and muffled phrasing that can rarely be heard beyond the immediate range of her pinkie ring. The baffling and annoying results are incomprehensible readings of “Prelude to a Kiss” and “I Wonder What Became of Me” that make her look and sound like a ventriloquist. I guess you could say that her usual perkiness is taking a sabbatical. When she’s there, the alleged “staging” is so awkward that she spends her time circling her co-star and waiting for her turn at the mike, but for at least half of the show, she’s not even in the room. That leaves Mr. Harris with all the best songs, but although he acquits himself nicely on such Mercer evergreens as “Laura,” “Skylark” and “Midnight Sun,” there’s a sameness to his style. Wrapped in his soft brushstrokes, the tunes all tend to sound pretty much alike. The best thing about this show is the accompaniment by the distinguished jazz pianist Eric Reed, although even he seems 50 percent frustrated.

I don’t know what is going on here or who thought up this bad idea in the first place, but at these prices, two fine performers end up wasting a lot of the audience’s valuable time and money. KT Sullivan and Allan Harris have both been treasures individually, on their own and in different venues, but to a mere mortal who has admired them elsewhere, this badly conceived collaboration is not a musical marriage made in any heaven I recognize.