REVIEW: Flimsy Princess Kaiulani Serves Up Hawaiian History Lite
Designed to be both essential history lesson and costume weeper, Princess Kaiulani comes up short on both fronts: Deadly earnest intentions and lack of dramatic gumption ensure that the story of Hawaii's favored daughter remains under-told. Skimping on detail and narrative depth, the film manages to misuse its embarrassment of natural resources -- beautiful brown people in Victorian garb, for one thing; the tetchy notion that British colonization suited the Hawaiians better than American imperialism did, for another -- in its determination to honor them with a queasy blend of History Channel import and Merchant-Ivory sweep.
First-time writer-director Marc Forby had much to work with, beginning with the facts of Hawaii's 1898 annexation into the United States. What is often glossed over as a boon for all parties -- who wouldn't want to join the party in the USA? -- is actually the unhappy end of a sovereign and prosperous country, one that managed to figure out electricity long before the mainland did. Despite the fact that he shot in Honolulu's actual palace and on location in England, Forby's most spectacular visual would seem to be the young woman playing the Scottish-Hawaiian princess: Q'orianka Kilcher, who shares her character's distinctive blended heritage. Her features have hardened since her breakout role (playing another sufferer of American folly, Pocahontas) in The New World, and her sharp chin, long cheekbones and small, glowing eyes suit a tragic princess well. But while Kilcher can pull some impressive faces, they form the extent of her characterization. This princess has two speeds: petulant intensity and girlish charm.
She has, at least, plenty of cause to work the former. Carted off to England at age 13 after the Americans attempt to overthrow Hawaii's monarchy, Princess Kaiulani becomes just another piker getting paddywhacked through the British school system. Boarding with friends of her father's (her Hawaiian mother has died), she does not adjust to her demotion to "princess of nowhere" well: She's alienated from her host family, particularly the unimpressed young son Clive (Shaun Davies), and her treatment at the hands of the headmistress sets up an interesting angle on class and racial tensions. But Forby scraps the storyline almost as soon as it is established. We cut from Kaiulani's first, ominous humiliation at school to two years later, where we find her a little calmer and on the cusp of falling in love with Clive, whose initial derision practically stamped "future love interest" across his forehead.
Much of the history of Princess Kaiulani plays out in the same way. I still don't understand much of how or why the Americans were able to wrest Hawaii from itself, despite a host of characters who enter the frame solely to speak in clear, expository paragraphs. As the head royal-buster, Barry Pepper gets little more to do than twirl the giant moustache on the face of early American imperialism. On her way home via a stop in Washington, Kaiulani gets one suitably rousing showcase, when she meets and wins over the press; its capital is wasted in the next scene, wherein the princess, having scored a lunch with President Cleveland, crafts a tortured metaphor for Hawaii's plight using roasted hen and cumin as props.
Ultimately credited with guaranteeing the right to vote for the Hawaiian people (the Americans intended to deny it), Kaiulani was clearly a formidable woman, a character with character. We're told, as the film closes with yet more dreamy shots of her sucking face with her doomed English lover, that Kaiulani died at 23 due to what many believe was "a broken heart at the loss of her country." To flinch in the face of such a crucial detail of his central character's life is the film's parting reminder that its director, having faltered repeatedly in negotiating the terms of Kaiulani's story, lacked the wherewithal to close the deal.
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Comments
Alas, Hawaiian history is a rich topic. Mediocre films with good premises are the most frustrating.
I guess the upside here is that one of Roman Grant's child brides got away.
how quaint do these movie critics shun this movie..in which they have no culutral or historical understanding of the Hawaiian Kingdom!!!!They critique on poor story lines, states its a mediocre film, yet makes comments like "WHO WOULDNT WANT TO BE A PART OF THE USA?" E KALA MAI(EXCUSE ME) BUT the Hawaiian people did not..our kingdom was overthrown by a bunch of greedy WHITE MEN who seen the value of our of 'aina (land) and in 1893 began "LAND GRABS" AND PLACED OTHER white affliates in position of power to create false documents, false land auctions, false claims to deeds and bill of sales... the manipulation of treason on their own part to secretly overthrow our kingdom was DONE WITH PURE GREED! IM SURE THEY ARE ALL IN HELL FOR WHAT THEY DID TO A NATION OF PEACEFUL PEOPLE. They locked up our queen in her own palace! what cabinet members do that? ONLY THE WHITE MEN like thurston and dole and charles reed bishop...and many more...so before you criticize of this poor story line, mediocre film...we the Hawaiian people want the world to know what happen to our KINGDOM..and if the director took dialogue from Princess Ka'iulani's memoirs, journals, diaries and other personal autobiography..than THIS IS WHAT IT IS...YOU CANNOT CHANGE HISTORY....let the STORY BETOLD!
U tell 'em Ka'iulani! it's too bad that the movie did not have more Hawaiian history in it so that maybe the haoles would not be so ignorant. The comment "who would'nt want to be part of the US?" got a rise out me as well. The US has it's pros, but it also has many cons. It's the "land of the free", but the haoles forget that they stole pretty much every indigenous people's land; they kill the brown people, make them surrender to them and sign unfair treaties, and they definitely did not make it free for the host culture. We're talking about the Mexicans, Indians, Hawaiians, Polynesians, Micronesians, and so on and so on. They surely have entitlement issues going way back.
I think the article was right about lacking more details to the history and that it didn't really inspire me much, which is usually what great movies do - all this movie did was make me angry and we already have a lot of hostility towards the haoles already (and for good reasons which they still do not clearly understand).
I would have also loved to see "ainahau" where Kailuani grew up and maybe compare it to present day, which today is a skyscraper hotel in the middle of Waikiki amid a tourist trap of gaudy alohawear and tikis. This is what the great US did to Hawaii - took the Hawaiian people's land and turned it into straight up Capitalism, the very opposite of Hawaiian values. Ainahau was once a breathtaking estate and now it's pimped out to the "Ugly American" who wants everything in Hawaii to be exactly like where they are from. I always wonder why they ever bothered traveling away from home?!
They also shoulda played Bruddah Iz's song, "how would the people feel...." during the credits. They would feel sick to their stomachs by present day Hawaii. Thousands of homeless Hawaiians living on the beach and the white elite living on prime beach front property in their mansions that read "no trespassing" with their illegal bed and breakfasts.
First, Capt. Cook brings us disease and later the US steals our Nation in the name of democracy. Doesn't this sound like a familiar game plan (Iraq)? I hope that another movie or documentary will be made with more details and maybe Michael Moore could do it. I also wish Hawaiian Air would play "And then there were none" documentary on their flights. Then maybe the haoles would care a little more or Not!
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