Directed by Roger Michell and scripted by Richard Curtis, Notting Hill tries (laboriously) to be an inverse, postmodern Cinderella tale, in which the poor-little-rich-girl-megastar is saved from a life of inauthenticity and irony by the adoration of a good and simple man. Although the film's focus and tone are maddeningly erratic – it never decides whether it is comic romantic fantasy or earnest drama -- and the pace at times close to somnambulant, it does have one thing going for it. As Anna's good-humored and astonishingly patient Prince Charming, Hugh Grant gives a subtle, well-rounded, performance, rich in emotional shading and deftly comic. He manages to play more than Curtis' screenplay actually provides William Thacker, his bookshop-owner character, filling in the gaps and kicking over the traces of banal cliché with his characteristic charm and intelligence. Roberts, on the other hand, seems to play less than is scripted for her unsympathetically put-upon, rather whiny movie icon -- and that makes for a level of passive-aggressive presumption many filmgoers may find not only remote and uninteresting but actually off-putting. Notting Hill is the sort of project that needs real star power to carry it. One wishes for an Anna with the saving comic grace of an Audrey Hepburn or the eccentric glamour and brilliance of a Judy Davis. Anna spends most of the film indecisively playing William along and feeling sorry for herself about her fabulous wealth and fame, and it is painfully clear that Roberts is not approaching this as a send-up or even as a character. We're supposed to feel for her, wretched, media-hounded, lovelorn film goddess that she is. She stands around inertly with the camera dutifully locked on her for interminable lengths of time, her large eyes regularly misting over as if she were wearing glycerine for eyeliner, waiting for the film to come to her.

Like a true Prince Charming, Grant (accompanied by a vividly interesting supporting cast) does. He gives the audience the only thing to wait for in a romance that mistakenly compensates for its meager comedy and equally meager emotional depth with a listless pace and overstretched scenes that assume a universal awe for the mere presence of Miss Roberts. Her performance might be taken more seriously as an elaborate modeling photo-shoot, but two hours in a thin script as a fairly inane movie star provides too ample an opportunity for the audience to witness her ineptitude with comic technique and her smug, prescriptive, rather prosaic choices as a performer. Grant, faced with the same underdeveloped script, manages to make the film's uneven tone work in his character's favor; his William not only gives the story its brightness and energy, but its sense of discovery and humanity as well. Even those who queue up to see America's Sweetheart are more likely to remember her co-star in this outing, and to wonder why sweet William even wanted to bother with Anna in the first place.