What A Girl Wants is apparently an adaptation of a play, The Reluctant Debutante, but after reading the play’s synopsis, the movie departs quite a bit from the original material to possibly exploit the success of The Princess Diaries. Amanda Bynes plays Daphne, an American girl who discovers that her father is British nobility and decides to meet him when he is at a personal and professional crossroads. When I originally put it in my queue, I was probably charmed by the trope of a regular girl becoming a princess. Watching it decades after its original release, I am really here for Colin Firth, who plays her father, Lord Henry Dashwood, but sadly never wears glasses.
Firth’s character is Guy Ritchie’s dream noble-a blue blood who is simultaneously a man of the people. He decides that instead of getting appointed, he should get elected to Parliament. As Debbie Downer, I am obligated to point out that this decision actually has the net effect of taking away more power from the people since he was already able to get a seat in the House of Lords. He is actually taking away a seat from someone who is only eligible to get elected to the House of Commons. He seems power hungry to me. Between Mamma Mia! and What A Girl Wants, I need to stop watching movies because Firth is in it playing an unwittingly absent father.
Even though What A Girl Wants bothered me less than Mamma Mia!, I am still a lawyer and can be a movie killjoy. A woman cannot just unilaterally put a dude on a birth certificate. He needs to sign a lengthy legal acknowledgment and have photo identification. I hate the popular notion that mothers can do whatever they want with a child, including not telling the father of a child’s existence, without a good reason like abuse. This idea is never greeted with disapproval in popular culture or as possibly a mistake with the exception of Girls.
I preferred What A Girl Wants to Mamma Mia! as an entertaining, but disturbing twist on a rom com focused on love against all odds. The location is gorgeous in a touristy way. I am also here for the fashion, dated and not. Instead of hoping that the hottest people in the movie become a couple, we hope that Firth and Bynes become father and daughter. All the rom com tropes are used including another, more suitable mother and daughter (what happened to the father in that family) competing for his attentions, date like montages of him courting her with motorcycles and the threat of them breaking up then reuniting. The struggle for Lord Dashwood’s is reflected in which family he will choose. Ew? If he was actually a decent man, it would not be a choice, but how to integrate everyone in his life. He is the adult. Why do daughters have to fight over him?
In real life, if a father spends little time with his daughter after he meets her, is embarrassed when he puts her in unfamiliar situations without providing orientation and constantly ditches or judges her for other people who better fit his ambitions then only chooses his daughter when she gives him a bump in popularity, we would hate that guy. Because the filmmakers relate to Lord Dashwood, and Firth plays him, we just obediently follow the cues of a class division and social mobility narrative without judging him. He obviously just needs to chill out and try to recapture his younger spirit, which normally signals a midlife crisis, but not for him. We are supposed to buy that he should be a leader while being simultaneously clueless and repeatedly manipulated, a victim. It is just a continuation of the pathological need to trivialize, minimize and shift blame for men engaging in bad behavior.
On a lighter note, if you were ever an Anglophile who fantasized about running away to the United Kingdom and exploring, What A Girl Wants is the movie for you. With Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s wedding, the culture clash theme and subversion of rigid social hierarchies never gets old, but in this movie, without the element of race, the age gap, class and national culture clash are played for laughs and are polarized. Americans are good and down to Earth whereas British people are too stuffy and ambitious so they need to loosen up. Still the movie wants to preserve the bloodlines by insuring that this little girl protagonist instantly gets a suitor that at the eleventh hour we discover has a similar lineage. Think of him as the boy Rory Gilmore across the pond. I obviously did not care about that child’s love life or that storyline, but it is supposed to be charming, not alarming, when her relationship somewhat parallels her parents.
What A Girl Wants has musical elements. Daphne’s mother and boyfriend sing professionally. Are those elements good? No, advantage goes to Mamma Mia!. Kelly Preston, who is gone too soon, plays her mother, and she cannot sing. I am not being mean. It is a fact. How did her character financially support her child with that voice? Oliver James is only comparatively better with his cover of a famous James Brown song. Apparently James was in a boy band that Simon “So You Think You Can Dance” Fuller produced. For some reason, his character keeps getting jobs with the aristocrats?
Some elements of What A Girl Wants do not age well decades later. Only young girls could enjoy not one, but two shopping excursions in street marketplaces. Characters’ coolness is proportionate to their proximity to people of color. Daphne and her mom live in Chinatown. Her parents met in the desert, and a Bedouin performed the wedding. Do any people of color actually have speaking lines? The waiters got to sing. Also I know that kids like to fantasize about parents reconciling and reuniting, but if two people have not seen each other for so long and just jump right back in without getting to know each other, it will be a nightmare, not a dream come true. Bynes and James went from rising young stars to obscurity. They are no longer in the public eye, which can be a great thing so hopefully it was voluntary, and they are living well wherever they are.
What A Girl Wants is streaming on Netflix if you are interested in checking out the strange rom com where the couple that the viewers are hoping that a father and daughter will get together. The intended viewer would relate to Daphne, but Firth fans will be able to get on board too, especially if you want a brief glimpse of the icon in leather pants and a sleeveless t-shirt though I preferred the untucked Oxford shirt and khakis look. Viewers should be cautioned that eating Cocoa Puffs will definitely not help you look like either actor.