The Prince & Me

BY JOHN ANDERSON | Staff Writer

Julia Stiles as Paige and Luke Mably as Eddie in "The Prince & Me." (AP Photo)

(PG). Tirelessly uplifting romance about a driven pre-med student and the inconsequential playboy who is secretly the prince of Denmark. To buy or not to buy ... that is the question. With Julia Stiles, Luke Mably, Ben Miller, Miranda Richardson, James Fox, Alberta Watson. Screenplay by Jack Amiel, Michael Begler, Katherine Fugate. Directed by Martha Coolidge. 1:51 (adult content, language). At area theaters

It may be time for the average, heterosexual, moviegoing male to get nervous, 'cause there's something potentially ugly going on in the ever-incendiary, feminist-backlash arena of the major motion picture.

Check it out: "Win a Date With Tad Hamilton" (movie star), "Welcome to Mooseport" (ex-U.S. president), "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights" (Cuban stud), "Chasing Liberty" (Secret Service stud) -- various underserved females are finding their romantic bliss through a flotilla of fantasy he-men. It's a lot to live up to. And I'm not sure we're up to it.

The latest entry, "The Prince & Me," dispenses with any camouflage and simply cuts to the fairy-tale basics -- Prince Charming. In this comedy by Martha ("Rambling Rose") Coolidge, Mr. PC is the not-so-charming Edvard Valdemar (Luke Mably), who after seeing a "Girls Gone Wild"-style video on Danish TV (easily the film's most moronic moment) decides that Wisconsin is the place to exercise the overactive royal libido. Thus, he parachutes into the life of the focused, driven, undistracted Paige Morgan (Julia Stiles), a farm-raised pre-med student whose life and career are on a fast track and whose determination is not to let a love life derail it. Except that, well, you know. Hormones. And stuff. It's a story as old as Prince Charming.

Stiles is, as usual, adorable, the thinking-adolescent's sex symbol, and she makes a lot of unpalatable plotlines palatable. (Recall her in "10 Things I Hate About You" -- caustic and priceless.) To have her character fall head over heels for a facile love object like Eddie -- aka the Crown Prince of Denmark -- would be obscene on its face, so there is a process by which one educates the other: Eddie tutors Paige in Shake.speare, Paige tutors Eddie in humility. It's been a while since the Bard has exerted tangible seductive power in a modern movie. It's good to see he still has the gift.

But the entire "Oh my gawd, he's a prince!" episode occurs far too early in the movie -- given a three-act structure, the wedding arrangements occur somewhere toward the end of Act II. So you know there's going to be a bit more to the tale than carriage rides and flowers; the audience's shared familiarity with the structure of Hollywood movies makes it apparent that, even if the filmmakers would like to delude us into thinking resolution has been achieved, resolution has not been achieved.

Suffice to say that Stiles -- who recently played the pre-law student who opted for marriage in "Mona Lisa Smile" -- was not going to be playing the bridal sacrifice two films in a row. But "The Prince & Me" wants it multiple ways -- ceremonial, matrimonial and intellectual. While Miranda Richardson, of whom we never see enough, gives the film's one convincing performance as Eddie's mother (and is the only one who sounds vaguely Danish), the conventional romantic frou-frou -- replete with oppressively alternative singer-songwriter ballads with their plot-mortar lyrics -- ratchets everything down to the level of brain-death. Stiles, for one, deserves better -- but not necessarily a handsome prince, especially not one from a Denmark, where they speak English with British accents.