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Press - 2005
'Princess' defies the physics of formula film
"The computer doesn't make the jumps. You do." - Casey to Gen
Yes, "Ice Princess" is a formula movie. Yes, it makes all the stops and hits all
the beats and, yes, it ends exactly as we expect it will. It even has the
inevitable scene where the gifted young heroine is in the middle of her
performance and she looks up into the audience -- and there she is! Her mother!
Who disapproves of figure skating but came to the semi-finals without telling
her, and now nods and smiles like dozens of other parents in dozens of other
movies, recognizing at last that their child has the real stuff. Yes, yes and
yes.
And yet the movie works. I started by clicking off the obligatory scenes, and
then somehow the film started to get to me, and I was surprised how entertained
I was. Like "Shall We Dance" or "Saturday Night Fever," it escapes its genre.
That's partly because the screenplay avoids the usual rigid division of good and
evil and gives us characters who actually change during the movie. Partly
because the acting is so convincing. And partly because the actresses in the
movie really can skate -- or seem to. Well, no wonder, since two of them are
figure skaters, but the surprise is that Michelle Trachtenberg and Hayden
Panettiere, in the leads, can skate, too. Those don't look like doubles on the
ice.
Trachtenberg plays Casey Carlyle, a brilliant high school science student, who
hopes to win a Harvard scholarship with a physics project. Her teacher advises
her to find an original subject, and she gets a brainstorm: What if she films
figure skaters, analyzes their movements on her computer, and comes up with a
set of physics equations describing what they do and suggesting how they might
improve?
Casey has always been a science nerd. She's pretty but doesn't know it, and so
shy "I can't talk to anyone I haven't known since kindergarten." She goes to the
ice rink in her Connecticut town run by Tina Harwood (Kim Cattrall), herself an
Olympic figure skating contender until a disqualification at Saravejo. Now Tina
coaches her daughter, Gen (Hayden Panettiere), toward championship status.
Casey's computer program works. She breaks down the moves, analyzes the physics,
and advises Gen and other skaters on what they can change to improve their
performance. Along the way, a funny thing happens; Casey has always enjoyed
skating on the pond near her home, and now she grows fascinated by figure
skating, and wants to
start training. This is horrifying news for her mom (Joan Cusack), a feminist
and teacher who is pointing Casey toward Harvard and sniffs, "Figure skaters
have no shelf life." Meanwhile, Gen confesses she envies Casey: "I hate to train
all the time. I'd love to have a real life, like you." To her mom Gen says, "I'm
fed up with being a dunce in math class because I don't have time to do the
homework."
The movie, written by Hadley Davis and directed by Tim Fywell, starts with a
formula and then takes it to the next level. We have two obsessive stage mothers
and two driven overachievers, and the girls want to trade places, to the despair
of their moms (no dads are in sight, except for a proud Korean-American father).
This leads to more substance than we're expecting, and more acting, too, since
the central characters don't follow the well-worn routines supplied by the
GCFDDPO formula (Gifted Child Follows Dream Despite Parental Opposition). They
strike out with surprises of their own.
I am not prepared to say whether every actress in the movie does all of her own
skating, and the movie's publicity is coy on the point, apart from pointing out
that actresses Kirsten Olson (Nikki) and Juliana Cannarozzo (Zoe) are figure
skaters making their first movie. What's more important is that they play figure
skaters so convincingly.
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