Ending Spoils Magic Of `Princess Caraboo'

Movie review

XX 1/2 "Princess Caraboo," with Phoebe Cates, Wendy Hughes, Jim Broadbent, Stephen Rea, Kevin Kline, John Lithgow. Directed by Michael Austin, from a script by Austin and John Wells. Broadway Market, Crossroads, Factoria, Grand Cinemas Alderwood, Metro, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Renton Village, SeaTac North. "PG" - Parental guidance advised, for "mild sensuality and language." -----------------------------------------------------------------

A fairy tale that falls just short of becoming magical, "Princess Caraboo" is based on a true story that it might have explored in more tantalizing detail.

It's set in 1817 in an English village, where a mysterious stranger who calls herself Caraboo (Phoebe Cates) baffles the locals with her exotic dress, manner and language. Eventually she reveals that she was kidnapped from a royal Javanese household, jumped off a pirate ship and swam to the coast.

She appeals immediately to a social-climbing couple (Jim Broadbent, Wendy Hughes) who dote on her and see her as an opportunity to increase their standing. Their contemptuous Greek butler (Kevin Kline) immediately doubts her authenticity and enlists a pretentious academic (John Lithgow) to expose her as a fraud.

In the end they're both charmed, and so is a newspaperman (Stephen Rea) who nevertheless continues to investigate her claims. He can't quite buy her story, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the audience to buy his involvement with her. If he loves her, why does he persist in trying to reveal her identity, knowing the severity of the era's laws, which included capital punishment for fraud?

The script's ending is sheer fantasy, which would be fine if director and co-writer Michael Austin (one of the screenwriters on "Greystoke") had brought any conviction to it, but it's the weakest aspect of the picture. It doesn't help that Rea, who wears a bemused look throughout, plays his final scenes as if he didn't quite believe them either.

It's not that Rea gives a bad performance. It's just that he can't make sense of the role, and that's equally true of Kline, Lithgow and Broadbent. Once their characters become convinced of Caraboo's credentials, they lose all interest. Cates, who is required to do little but appear graceful and uncomprehending, comes off better because she's allowed to keep the mystery going.

Austin might have had more luck if he'd followed the dramatic emphasis in a couple of similar stories, "The Music Man" and "Six Degrees of Separation," which end with their heroines transformed and liberated by an encounter with a charismatic enigma.

The Wendy Hughes character, like the frustrated women played by Shirley Jones and Stockard Channing in those films, should be at the center of "Princess Caraboo." This fine Australian actress does work hard, despite the roadblocks in her way, to make it happen. But her director seems both more interested in a conventionally romantic happy ending and unwilling to go all the way with it.