Despite the poor grammar of the title, The Prince and Me is an enjoyable movie with a bit of a twist on the Cinderella story. Young girls, teenage girls, and women—and their dates who want to please them—are the audience for this movie. People of all ages and both genders were in the packed theater where we saw it, and it seemed everyone was laughing out loud when they weren’t cheering the heroes. Paige Morgan is a senior at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and grew up on a dairy farm in the same state with her parents and three brothers. Her final year at the university is going to be completely focused on getting the grades, recommendations, and perfect applications to get into medical school—preferably at Johns Hopkins, one of the premier medical schools in the United States. Her goal is to serve the poor, working with Doctors Without Borders throughout the world. And Paige has the determination and ability to do it, although her time is crunched by the need to work part-time at the Rathskellar, a popular student hangout. She’s also concerned about a required class on Shakespeare, as she has previously stuck to the math and science classes needed for pre-med. Enter Prince Edvard of Denmark, who is eager to get away from the palace and the fishbowl life of a handsome prince. Studying incognito as “Eddie,” he chose the University of Wisconsin because someone sent him a video of the “Wild Women of Wisconsin,” who apparently take off their tops at the request of photographers (fortunately, we are spared any nudity). Eddie ends up in Paige’s high-level organic chemistry class as her lab partner. He becomes interested in her, and, because he declared financial independence from his parents when they objected to his plans, runs out of money. He gets a job at the Rathskellar, also, and manages to keep it with Paige’s help. Paige doesn’t take any nonsense from this handsome but spoiled young man. As they work together and he helps her with Shakespeare (who would know more about Shakespeare than the Prince of Denmark?), he also learns that his lack of punctuality and other flaws that were overlooked by those who knew he was a prince won’t be tolerated by Paige. She asks some obvious questions, like why Eddie has a “friend” (a 30ish valet/bodyguard named Soren) who couldn’t be a college student and why Eddie needs her to teach him to do his laundry. Paige and Eddie become friends and eventually fall in love. But don’t think you know exactly how things will turn out. The movie contains some passionate kissing and one scene where Eddie takes his shirt off after he and Paige have kissed a few times (in the university library stacks, which hardly seem to have the necessary privacy for a young man to remove his shirt, much less for passion-among-the-books—and indeed, they are interrupted). Students at the Rathskellar, including Paige and Eddie, drink beer and shots of whiskey (the latter only once). There is mild swearing and not much of that. On the better side, Paige is a young woman with goals and self-respect, and doesn’t just fall into the arms of this good-looking guy. When Eddie visits Paige’s family at Thanksgiving, Paige’s father makes it clear that Eddie will be sleeping in Paige’s brother’s bedroom, across the hall from Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, “and we sleep with the door open.” The Prince & Me may be a bit lightweight, but it brings up some interesting questions about whether a handsome prince will someday ride to a girl’s rescue, what she’ll do then, and what he’ll do when he must face her desire to make her own contribution to the world.
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