The Princess Diaries arrived in 2001 as a Walt Disney Pictures comedy built on a familiar wish: an ordinary teenager learns she is royalty. Garry Marshall directed from a screenplay by Gina Wendkos, working from Meg Cabot’s 2000 novel of the same name. It runs 115 minutes and carries the tagline “She rocks. She rules. She reigns.” Anne Hathaway plays Mia Thermopolis in her film debut. Julie Andrews plays Queen Clarisse Renaldi. The film wants to be warm, broad and harmless, and it succeeds at all three. That is also the problem.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
Mia Thermopolis and the Firehouse in San Francisco
Mia is a Grove High School student who lives with her single mother, Helen, in a refurbished firehouse in San Francisco. She is unpopular. She has a fear of public speaking. She has a crush on Josh Bryant, and Josh’s girlfriend, Lana Thomas, teases her. Her only friends are political activist Lilly Moscovitz and Lilly’s older brother, Michael, who secretly harbors feelings for her.
Then a diplomatic visit changes everything. Mia is invited to meet her estranged paternal grandmother, Clarisse. She learns she is the sole heir to the small European kingdom of Genovia, having inherited the position from her recently deceased father, Philippe. Clarisse presides over Genovia as Queen regent and is determined to make Mia a refined princess.
Mia initially refuses. Her mother convinces her to attend the “princess lessons” on one condition: she need not make her final decision until the Genovian Independence Day Ball, three weeks away. That deadline is the whole engine of the movie. Everything else is decoration.
A Makeover, a Limousine and Joe
Mia gets a glamorous makeover and a limousine chauffeured by Joe, the queen’s head of security and confidant. Héctor Elizondo plays Joe, and the film hands him the job of becoming a father figure to Mia. It is the sturdiest relationship in the picture, partly because Elizondo does not push it.
Her transformation changes how her schoolmates treat her. Her schedule strains her friendship with Lilly. To appease her best friend, Mia tells Lilly the truth and swears her to secrecy. The secret does not hold. Paolo, the beautician responsible for the makeover, sells it to the press, and paparazzi begin to pursue Mia relentlessly.
That betrayal is the most interesting thing in the film, and the film does not know what to do with it. It treats the leak as a plot turn to be survived rather than a rupture to be examined. Paolo is a device. He exists to move Mia from private to public and then leave the frame.
Anne Hathaway’s Audition and the Cast Around Her
Hathaway was eighteen when she was cast. She auditioned during a 26-hour layover in Los Angeles while traveling to New Zealand to film The Other Side of Heaven (2001). Her only prior acting credit had been the short-lived television series Get Real. She recalled that she fell out of her chair out of nervousness, and her inherent clumsiness is credited with impressing Marshall.
The list of actresses considered for Mia is long: Reese Witherspoon, Kirsten Dunst, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Alicia Silverstone, Jessica Biel, Claire Danes, Kate Hudson, Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Brittany Murphy, Katie Holmes, Christina Applegate, Kate Beckinsale and Eva Mendes. Liv Tyler was deemed a front-runner. Juliette Lewis turned the role down. Christy Carlson Romano could not audition because of scheduling conflicts while filming the Disney Channel series Even Stevens.
Marshall’s granddaughters convinced him to cast Hathaway over Tyler because they felt she had the more “princess-like hair.” She was cast based solely on her audition, with no screen test. Marshall believed other candidates could handle Mia’s comedic side but felt only Hathaway had “the grace and authority” required for the character’s climactic speech.
She rocks. She rules. She reigns.
That is the tagline, and it is doing more work than the movie does. The supporting cast includes Heather Matarazzo as Lilly, Caroline Goodall as Helen, Robert Schwartzman as Michael, Erik von Detten as Josh, Mandy Moore as Lana, Sandra Oh as Vice Principal Gupta, Patrick John Flueger as Jeremiah Hart, Sean O’Bryan as Patrick O’Connell and Kathleen Marshall as Charlotte Kutaway. Andrews joined because of Marshall’s involvement, marking her first Disney film since Mary Poppins in 1964. She was semi-retired from acting at the time.
A G-Rating and What It Costs
Development began after Cabot’s agent, believing in the novel’s feature film potential, pursued Debra Martin Chase to adapt it. Chase secured a deal with Disney, and the film was greenlit in August 1999, co-produced with Whitney Houston’s BrownHouse Productions. Wendkos collaborated with Chase on the screenplay, which differs from Cabot’s novel. Certain themes were softened. Other aspects were introduced or removed. Marshall sought a G-rated film with broad appeal to adults and children.
That decision explains the film’s texture. It is smooth where the book was sharp. Chase also decided the main cast’s ethnicity would remain faithful to the novel because Mia and Clarisse rule a European country, and the producer preferred to “make good movies” as opposed to only African-American films. Elizondo returned as a frequent Marshall collaborator, and Marshall’s family appears in minor roles.
Mia embarrasses herself at her first state dinner. Clarisse admits she found the clumsiness endearing. The beat lands, but it lands softly, because the film has already decided that Mia’s awkwardness is a phase rather than a self.
What the Movie Does With Three Weeks
The three-week structure is clean. Lessons, ball, decision. Marshall keeps it moving and never lets a scene run long enough to become uncomfortable. For a family comedy, that is craft. For a story about a girl choosing between two lives, it is a dodge.
The film’s central question is whether Mia claims or renounces her title. The film treats that question as a scheduling problem. Every complication — the leak, the strained friendship, the paparazzi — resolves into a lesson about being yourself, which is the one answer the premise cannot support. A girl who chooses a throne is not being herself. She is choosing a duty.
Andrews carries the film’s authority. Hathaway carries its anxiety. The two of them together are the reason to watch. Andrews plays Clarisse as a woman who has already made her choice and does not regret it, and the performance has a stillness the rest of the movie lacks. Hathaway’s Mia is all motion and apology, and the contrast works.
Julie Andrews and the Stillness of Clarisse
Andrews was semi-retired when she took the part, and she came back for Marshall. Her Clarisse is the film’s one figure who does not need to be convinced of anything. She knows what the throne costs because she has already paid it.
The script does not always give her enough to do. She tutors, she scolds, she softens. But when she admits she found Mia’s clumsiness endearing after the state dinner, the film briefly becomes about something real: an old woman recognizing a younger version of herself.
That moment is small and it is the best one in the picture. It arrives late, and it does not last.
The Princess Diaries at 5 of 10
The Princess Diaries is a competent, well-cast, thoroughly pleasant film that refuses to be about anything. Its 115 minutes pass without friction. The makeover sequence does what a makeover sequence should. Elizondo’s Joe gives the film a spine it did not earn. Moore’s Lana is a stock antagonist with almost nothing to do.
The published critical score sits at 5.0 out of 10, with Rotten Tomatoes at 50 percent. That split is fair. The film is not a failure and not a success. It is a template, executed cleanly, with two performances better than the material around them.
What matters here is the casting. Marshall’s granddaughters picked Hathaway over Liv Tyler because of her hair, and Marshall kept her because of a speech. That is how a star gets made, and it happened in this movie. Hathaway’s Mia is the reason The Princess Diaries is remembered at all. Andrews is the reason it is watchable.
What is noise is the machinery. The Paolo leak, the paparazzi chase, the state dinner embarrassment — none of it changes Mia in a way the film is willing to sit with. The softened themes Marshall wanted are exactly the ones that would have given the story weight. A G-rated Princess Diaries is a safe Princess Diaries, and safe is what it is.
The film’s real subject is the gap between who Mia is at Grove High and who she has to become. The movie notices the gap, names it, and then closes it with a makeover and a limousine. That is a wish, not a story. It works well enough for 115 minutes. It does not work well enough to be worth returning to.
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