The Not-So-Secret ‘Life of Princess Di’

There are surely good reasons for CBS airing its latest Sunday night movie beyond suckering viewers into believing it contains juicy stuff about the late Princess Diana. But just try to think of one.

“The Biographer: The Secret Life of Princess Di” tells no secrets in purporting to relate what led Andrew Morton to write his bestseller, “Diana: Her True Story.”

It was published in 1992, five years before Diana’s death, making this junky reworking of old material as contemporary as the redcoats guarding Buckingham Palace.

One has to be hopelessly Dianaphilic to stay with Joshua Lacey’s vacant, barely ambulatory account that has Morton (Paul McGann), a reporter for the London Daily Mail, being approached by an intermediary with Diana’s offer to tell him the truth about herself and her volatile relations with Charles and his family. He never meets with her, but soon is listening to her tape-recorded words (“My husband made me feel so inadequate ... in every possible way”) that are delivered to him in installments, surreptitiously.

The royals are on to him, nonetheless. “From now on I shall never call you at your office,” Morton’s contact says ominously from a phone booth, as director Philip Saville tries gamely for suspense along the lines of “In Defense of the Realm,” a tense 1987 thriller about a snoopy British tabloid reporter who runs dangerously afoul of nefarious elements inside the British government.

The result, instead, is paralysis, a static hybrid of Diana’s words and news clips of her, along with close-ups of someone’s lips or hands and Morton’s tape recorder’s red light flashing on and off.

Faye Dunaway is dusted off for a silly cameo as a gossip columnist, Brian Cox grumbles as Morton’s initially skeptical publisher, and McGann’s biographer is traumatized at times by Diana’s taped tales. It’s hard getting worked up about him or her, though, in a movie so inadequate ... in every possible way.

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“The Biographer: The Secret Life of Princess Di” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG-D-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with advisories for dialogue and language).