The Prince & Me (2004)

A pre-med student at the University of Wisconsin spends her days in organic chemistry labs and her evenings pouring drinks, until a Danish crown prince arrives in Madison under the alias Eddie and rearranges her lab schedule. Martha Coolidge directs with a quiet, unfussy hand, and the film never pretends to be more than a fairy tale with a Wisconsin accent. It is 2004, and the machinery of the studio romantic comedy is fully exposed: the meet-cute in a bar, the Thanksgiving at the family dairy, the tabloid ambush in the library stacks.

Paige does eventually walk away from a crown to keep her medical ambition, which is a genuine if modest gesture toward female self-determination, and Coolidge lends it a plain dignity. Beyond that, the film is a cultural blank. The cast is uniformly white. There are no queer characters, no engagement with race, no climate anxiety, no neurodivergent figures, and no argument about bodies beyond a running gag that treats a flash of skin in a beer commercial as a punchline. The dairy farm subplot glances at a struggling family operation, and there is a scene of the prince reconciling workers and employers in a parliamentary committee, but the film has no interest in following either thread anywhere uncomfortable.

It lectures no one. This is a brisk, well-mannered piece of wish fulfillment, and there is something almost restful about a romance that asks nothing of its audience but ninety minutes and a tolerant attitude toward Danish accents. The sequel factory would later produce three more of these, which tells us something about the durability of the formula and very little about the conscience of its era. A sommelier would call this vintage forgettable, and would be right, and would pour it anyway.

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