OxfordPress.com

Grade: B

Verdict: Charming prince. Charming movie. Very charming Julia Stiles.

Paige (Julia Stiles) drives a worn-out pickup truck around rural Wisconsin. Edvard (Luke Mably) drives a souped-up BMW through the streets of Copenhagen. She spends her time pondering test tubes. He spends his pondering tube tops. She knows laundry. He knows sonnets. She says tomato, he says .Ê.Ê. well, you get the idea.

Paige and Edvard -- who's also the Crown Prince of Denmark -- are the class-crossed lovers in the charming lite romance "The Prince & Me."

Hoping for a little more goof-off time before assuming his royal responsibilities -- and having seen a video called "Wild Girls of Wisconsin" -- Edvard (now Eddie) enrolls as an exchange student at the University of Wisconsin, where Paige is a senior studying pre-med. They meet-bad when he, thinking this is the American way, tries a piggish come-on at the bar where Paige works. "I love to be made to feel like a brainless slut by a total stranger," she later tells him.

Luckily, things get better. Until, that is, Eddie is outed by the paparazzi. He's forced to go home, and she, despite her medical school plans, follows him. Happily ever after seems inevitable, only .Ê.Ê. it isn't.

The King (James Fox) and, especially, the Queen (Miranda Richardson) have some reservations about a commoner in spitting distance of the throne. And will Paige truly find palace balls more to her taste than chemistry labs?

A feminist fairy tale for the 21st century, "The Prince & Me" caters to a generation that grew up taking it for granted they could go to work or stay at home or, if they've got the stamina, do both. In other words, Cinderella meets the Powerpuff Girls.

The director, Martha Coolidge, was part of the first wave of women directors in the Õ70s, when a woman directing a movie was as much a marvel as a walking bear. You can take the feminist out of the Õ70s, but you can't necessarily take the Õ70s out of the feminist.

Coolidge tends to hammer home her messages as if it were 1973 instead of 2004. Still, she's good with her actors. Fox and Richardson mostly stand around in elegant clothes, talking in plummy accents, but at least Coolidge had the smarts to cast actors this good to help give her fairy tale some heft. Mably shows promise in a relatively thankless role -- the irresistible object in someone else's quest. And Stiles is simply delightful. With her forthright manner and broad-browed beauty, she's one of those actors blessed with an appealing immediacy. You feel directly connected to her and her character.

The movie is well-crafted overall, but it can give way to sloppy moments. In one perplexing scene, Eddie's Thanksgiving weekend at Paige's family farm is highlighted by a lawn mower race, attended by the locals in shirt sleeves. A coatless late November day in Wisconsin? Now that's a fairy tale.