Back when I was still figuring out how I wanted to write my reviews, I covered The Prince & Me. This is one of my comfort films, because I always enjoy Julia Stiles in a romantic comedy, and also because I love stories about royalty. They’re often so much more enthralling than reality. This is a story that predates the ‘Christmas Prince’ craze, which has dominated the industry in made-for-TV fare for the past decade or so. While it is not technically a Christmas movie, it does feature Thanksgiving as a subplot.
The film focuses on a roguish prince, Edvard III (Luke Mably), who goes by “Eddie Williams” for much of the movie, the Crown Prince of Denmark and son of Haraald (James Fox) and Rosalind (Miranda Richardson), the King and Queen of Denmark. Constantly followed by the paparazzi while he ignores his royal duties in favor of more personal pursuits – such as racing with beautiful women hanging on his every word – Edvard decides to go to an American college anonymously… because of a Girls Gone Wild commercial. His majordomo, Søren (Ben Miller), is sent with him to ensure he actually focuses on his studies and grows into being a Prince, as the fate of the kingdom is on his shoulders.
Our other leader character is Paige Morgan (Julia Stiles), a young college student focused on achieving her dream of becoming a doctor and using her skills to help those in need in Third World countries. She is ambitious and dedicated, but that doesn’t stop her from being willing to go out with her friends – especially before her classes start up again and she has a five-hour lab course. Having grown up on a farm in Wisconsin with two older brothers, she’s far more down to earth than Edvard. Her life could not be more different from Edvard’s, not even counting the sheer class difference between them.
When the pair are put together in one of their classes, she is less than thrilled; yet, this is a rom-com, and it sets the stage for their relationship to bloom. But their biggest common denominator is their seeming disinterest in a real relationship – Paige is the last of her friend group to either marry or even get engaged, and Edvard is struggling with his title getting in the way of anything real – shown most clearly in his introduction when the person he is racing against throws the race in the Prince’s favor.
The Prince & Me offers some of the same takes that its successors would, despite being a theatrically released movie. Its focus on the actual country that Edvard is meant to lead is small, with one of the chief complaints about the film being that it fails to capture Denmark effectively. I suppose it’s no surprise that the same holds true for farm life in Wisconsin. Yet, these are details that act as filigree to the main point of the film: the romance. Whether this acts as a deal breaker depends on how invested you are in cultural presentation versus narrative prioritization. For me, even if there’s little reason for the Morgan family to own a riding mower beyond using it for racing, I’m not going to be bothered by it. Eddie’s mechanical skills help to win a race at the expense of a rival, Keith Kopetsky (Tony Munch), resulting in Eddie being punched and, ultimately, his first kiss with Paige.
While Paige’s family isn’t extremely focused on, the Thanksgiving subplot offers us a glimpse into the world that she came from. Her Father, Ben (John Bourgeois), and Mother, Amy (Albert Watson), are struggling on the farm. This is a common, yet understandable, refrain in middle America. It also serves to highlight the divide between Paige and Eddie – even if it is not a strict 1:1 ratio in how their ‘careers’ are defined.
Still, Ben Morgan’s throwaway line about “the family farm being extinct in twenty years,” while it struggles against corporate-owned farms… seems to have been fairly prescient. Eddie’s interest in his father’s criticisms is one of the more effective ways the film uses to show that Eddie is capable of expressing empathy and engaging with the day-to-day needs of his people.
One of my favorite scenes in the film is when Paige’s friend, Beth Curtis (Elisabeth Waterston), essentially tricks her into inviting Eddie back to her home for Thanksgiving. Aside from their first kiss, it is here that they discuss their lives more deeply and what they want out of them. That’s how you know you have a real friend that you can count on!
The first half of the film is spent building up a relationship in which Paige is the one teaching Eddie what it means to be ‘normal,’ without quite realizing that’s what she’s doing. Because to her, he’s just a quirky exchange student who has a man following him around. Yet, while Denmark’s royal family continues on without issue, its press is eager to find out where the playboy prince has run off to – as his antics bring in money for their papers.
At the halfway mark, everything shifts when Paige and Eddie are caught off guard by one of those paparazzi, and she learns the truth. Much of the second half of the film is Paige stepping into Eddie’s world and finding out just how much he had to set aside to even attempt to find a bit of normalcy in her world.
There were three sequels to The Prince & Me, of which Luke Mably returned for the first, while Paige was recast the first time around. After that, Mably didn’t return, and the role of King Edvard was also recast, with that pair leading 3 and 4 together. On its own, The Prince & Me is a cute, 2000s-era rom-com. Considering its sequels, it can be a bit over-the-top, but not overtly saccharine. Whether you wish to see where their story potentially goes after the ‘ray of hope’ ending this entry offers is up to you. I go back and forth on them – I enjoy the continuation, but at times the more trite aspects get in the way. I suppose it just depends on my mood and whether or not I want to see an ex-girlfriend go out of their way to sabotage true love.
Lloydd Marshall Books 