The last time we dropped in on the
royals Prince Philip (James Cromwell) was a tad crabby with the Queen (Helen
Mirren) about who was getting invited to pay respects to the very recently dead
Princess Diana, ex-wife of the Duke of Wales, and mother to the Queen’s
grandsons, heirs to the throne.
“Have you seen the latest funeral
guest list?”
“No.”
“I suggest you keep it that way. A
chorus line of soap stars and homosexuals – apparently Elton John is going to
be singing. That will be a first for Westminster Abbey.”
It’s a stretch to label The
King’s Speech a prequel to The Queen, Stephen Frears and Peter
Morgan’s witty, humanizing portrait of the royals under media siege for their
implied snub of Diana. But in many subtle ways director Tom Hooper’s moving
account of how a sickly boy kicks his fear of daddy, King George V, and becomes
a wartime monarch the British people still fondly recall, as well as father to
the current Queen, allows us to see these super privileged stand-ins for God
and Nation, as frail, resilient reeds before the gathering storm of WWII.
I doubt any E-book will hit me with
the fantasy inducing aroma of my British father’s 1947 copy of Queen
Elizabeth’s wedding photos. In some ways Hooper’s film is both my father’s
precious book and an irreverent debunking companion piece. Penned by David
Seidel the film puts the royals again in crisis mode: how an agonizingly shy
Duke of York – another sublime piece of observational, non-method acting from
Colin Firth, last year’s peerless A Single Man – overcomes a paralyzing
stammer to address his millions of subjects across the Empire via BBC short
wave radio. All tubes and whirling motors, the BBC’s transmitters rumble like
the engine room of a great ship, making even the glibbest of speakers feel a
tad unworthy.
The story opens in 1925 when
the then Duke of York was little more than a family embarrassment, illustrated
by his horrifying inability to get through perfunctory remarks at a royal
industrial fair. We see how an inability to talk on “the wireless,” would leave
this future Emperor feeling more than symbolically naked. Capable of pauses
rivaling the length of the Gettysburg Address, the Duke confronts his inadequacies
by viewing newsreel footage of the wretched little corporal’s mesmerizing
guttural attacks on everything the Duke represents. His young daughter,
Elizabeth, asks innocently, “What’s he saying.” The reply, “I don’t know, but
he seems to be saying it rather well.” The movie shows this sadly buttoned up
man could only relax during story time for Elizabeth and sister Margaret.
|
|
The King’s Speech gets a
huge boost from the odd couple chemistry of the future monarch and his nervy
therapist, Oscar winning Best Actor Geoffrey Rush. Upending centuries of royal
prerogatives, Rush’s Lionel Logue insists on seeing the future king in his
dimly lit home office -- “My game, my turf, my rules,” -- where his
teenage boys are treated more like princes than the Duke, whom he calls
“Bertie.”
The Duke and his teacher – whose
methods sprung from ministering to shell shocked Aussie soldiers – square off
over the Duke’s chain-smoking.
“I believe sucking smoke into your
lungs will kill you.”
“My physicians say it relaxes the
throat.”
“They’re idiots!”
“They’ve all been knighted.”
“That makes it official!”
Incidentally the future King’s
filthy habit would kill him by his mid-fifties.
While not nearly as astutely based
as Morgan’s script for The Queen on the backstage struggle for power
between the royals and the peoples’ elected leaders, Seidel movingly
demonstrates why the dying George V, feared leaving the throne to a human bowl
of Jello. “Who’ll stand between Herr Hitler – the jackboots – and Marshall
Stalin – the proletarian oblivion – you?”
It’s a tribute to Firth and Rush
that we forget other piddling matters of state,
including the movie’s drastic
compression of time and reordering of history -- shifting abruptly from
mid-twenties to late thirties as if the Jazz Age, Lindberg, the stock market
crash and rise of Herr Hitler were a bad acid trip from a long lost weekend.
The film provides short shrift to the British establishment’s fears that
Bertie’s brother, Edward VIII, was unfit for the throne as much for his Nazi
sympathies as for his flamboyant mistress, the twice divorced, Wallace Simpson,
who hosts a weekend castle soiree like a bootlegger’s wife.
The movie’s soul plays out in
Logue’s drab quarters where the third rate Shakespearean actor alternately
cajoles, flatters and bullies his prickly pupil. The teacher engages in a
series of pedagogical pranks that in an earlier age would have earned him
lodging in the Tower of London. Firth does the Duke’s stuttering transformation
as if he was an especially slow schoolboy whose behavior had to be rewarded by
petty wagers and playtime with Logue’s sons’ model airplane kits.
Firth astutely plays the Duke as a
human clenched fist – the film’s heartbreaking epiphany derives much of its
thump from the actor’s unwillingness to yield too glibly to our wishes that he
loosen up faster than Bertie did.
Missing her Harry Potter fright
wig, Helena Bonham Carter steals a slice of the movie as a no-nonsense royal wife
– the future Queen mum who lives to be 101 – who stumbles on Logue’s Hobbit
like quarters, with its cranky elevator -- as if she had a yen for a downscale
fish ‘n chip shop.
This Oscar bait – almost certainly
for Firth -- tour de force should leave you laughing, and perhaps shedding a
tear for a very human monarch. A while back a stuttering boy broke our hearts
in Rocket Science, soliciting grudging praise from a severely
controlling ex, “I upped your game, little man.” If The King’s Speech has
done its job you’ll feel that same lump in the throat when a trembling Duke
hears the dreaded words, “You’re live in two minutes, your Royal
Highness.”