The King's Speech
Feb. 10th, 2011 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustA surprising number and variety of people recommended The King's Speech to us surprisingly warmly, so we went to see it yesterday. I enjoyed it, without really seeing what it was that people had found so special about it.
It's a buddy movie, in which two men discover an unlikely friendship as they work together to achieve something, defeat something, whatever - and of course it fails the Bechdel test. It has two excellent central performances, from Colin Firth as the stammerer and Geoffrey Rush as his therapist, and -
- Look, for once I'm not going to worry about spoilers. There are three strands to the story, and I don't see any reason to pretend that we don't know how they are going to turn out. Will Bertie become king? Yes, as the title of the film assumes you are aware (and part of the emotional impact of the story comes from watching this known future hurtling towards the characters). Will Bertie overcome his disability, will he be able to deliver 'the King's Speech' adequately if not flawlessly? Of course he will. Will he and Logue become friends in spite of the gulf between them? Of course they will - and I was quite impatient at the scene on the eve of the coronation in which Derek Jacobi as a silkily odious Archbishop of Canterbury almost succeeds in sowing discord between them. I wanted to shake Bertie and shout at him: "Has Logue ever pretended to have any qualifications? Have any of the properly qualified doctors you have seen done you any good? Has he been getting results? Has the Archbishop ever shown any sign of being on your side? What is your PROBLEM?" Even given that the man is not too bright, this struck me as a very manipulative piece of plotting.
Geoffrey Rush has enormous fun with the part of Logue, indulging his vanities and emphasising his quick wit and mastery of his chosen profession. Colin Firth's portrayal of a man with a debilitating stammer is utterly convincing - and has also convinced people who are better placed to judge it than I am. He is effective, too, at the subtler business of suggesting the origins of the stammer, at Bertie's ambivalence towards it, determined to do his duty and fit himself for a more public role, yet clinging to the stammer which protects him from the terrifying role of monarch. Helena Bonham Carter's Duchess of York / Queen Elizabeth says explicitly that she had been reluctant to marry into the royal family, but thought that her husband's stammer would limit how much could be asked of him: she makes a faintly sinister figure, all icy sweetness as she silently observes the doctor failing to cure her husband. This reading no doubt arises, in part, from the film's need to co-ordinate public and private narratives; in reality, according to Wikipedia, the stammer was under control by 1927, but the film drags out the treatment for another decade. This construction of the narrative also means that the film's triumphant moment, the eponymous speech, is the broadcast anouncement that the country is at war. Having successfully broadcast this bad news, the king emerges to the smiles and congratulations of all: but where they see only a difficult task successfully accomplished, the film's audience know what horrors the future is going to bring.
Nonetheless, Firth wins your sympathy for the effort and determination with which he battles his way, word by word, through the speech (conducted every syllable of the way by Logue). I have less sympathy for his misfortune being dragged reluctantly onto the throne. When he says "I'm not a king, I'm a naval officer," I think "Maybe, but a naval officer with a rather fancier lifestyle, one who spends less time at sea and more with his family than most." There are many professions whose members can reflect that if they have less money than the royal family, at least they have more freedom: but serving naval officers aren't among them. The Duchess of York may not want to be queen, but you must still use the proper form to address her. There's a charming bedtime scene with the family, a bedtime story for the two little princesses, at which the nursery staff are blurred into the background, to suggest that here is a bubble of natural affection with the wider dysfunctional family (I was afraid of my father, says George V, and my sons are going to be afraid of me!): looking at 'the Yorks' two generations on, you can only think that if this is the happy family, that others don't bear thinking about.
The younger of the two daughters (Princess Margaret, therefore) is played by Ramona Marquez (the youngest child of the Outnumbered family). She is only one of a number of very good and very recognisable actors who crop up in this film, and I found it distracting: a sign of my limited engagement with the film rather than of any deficiency in the performances. I was similarly pleasantly distracted by the filming, the astonishing wide angle shots of interiors, the cathedrals and the state apartments wrapping themselves around the characters, Logue's equally palatial (though shabby and partially furnished) consulting rooms, a beautiful image of the house the new King must leave, shot from high above the central atrium, all four walls of the well curved snug as a snail's shell. Outside all is mist and blurred distances, an ingenious way of removing anachronistic intrusions.
One last thought: of course, the film can't actually portray the King's speech as it was. The audience would not stand for the vowels of aristocratic speech in the 1930s; it doesn't even risk the accent of the present-day queen. Paradoxically, the BBC announcer in the opening sequence is given a posher accent than the son of the king, whom he is introducing. I do see that this couldn't be helped, but the same limitation applies to the film as a whole: it changes history to make it more appealing to the viewer.
It's a buddy movie, in which two men discover an unlikely friendship as they work together to achieve something, defeat something, whatever - and of course it fails the Bechdel test. It has two excellent central performances, from Colin Firth as the stammerer and Geoffrey Rush as his therapist, and -
- Look, for once I'm not going to worry about spoilers. There are three strands to the story, and I don't see any reason to pretend that we don't know how they are going to turn out. Will Bertie become king? Yes, as the title of the film assumes you are aware (and part of the emotional impact of the story comes from watching this known future hurtling towards the characters). Will Bertie overcome his disability, will he be able to deliver 'the King's Speech' adequately if not flawlessly? Of course he will. Will he and Logue become friends in spite of the gulf between them? Of course they will - and I was quite impatient at the scene on the eve of the coronation in which Derek Jacobi as a silkily odious Archbishop of Canterbury almost succeeds in sowing discord between them. I wanted to shake Bertie and shout at him: "Has Logue ever pretended to have any qualifications? Have any of the properly qualified doctors you have seen done you any good? Has he been getting results? Has the Archbishop ever shown any sign of being on your side? What is your PROBLEM?" Even given that the man is not too bright, this struck me as a very manipulative piece of plotting.
Geoffrey Rush has enormous fun with the part of Logue, indulging his vanities and emphasising his quick wit and mastery of his chosen profession. Colin Firth's portrayal of a man with a debilitating stammer is utterly convincing - and has also convinced people who are better placed to judge it than I am. He is effective, too, at the subtler business of suggesting the origins of the stammer, at Bertie's ambivalence towards it, determined to do his duty and fit himself for a more public role, yet clinging to the stammer which protects him from the terrifying role of monarch. Helena Bonham Carter's Duchess of York / Queen Elizabeth says explicitly that she had been reluctant to marry into the royal family, but thought that her husband's stammer would limit how much could be asked of him: she makes a faintly sinister figure, all icy sweetness as she silently observes the doctor failing to cure her husband. This reading no doubt arises, in part, from the film's need to co-ordinate public and private narratives; in reality, according to Wikipedia, the stammer was under control by 1927, but the film drags out the treatment for another decade. This construction of the narrative also means that the film's triumphant moment, the eponymous speech, is the broadcast anouncement that the country is at war. Having successfully broadcast this bad news, the king emerges to the smiles and congratulations of all: but where they see only a difficult task successfully accomplished, the film's audience know what horrors the future is going to bring.
Nonetheless, Firth wins your sympathy for the effort and determination with which he battles his way, word by word, through the speech (conducted every syllable of the way by Logue). I have less sympathy for his misfortune being dragged reluctantly onto the throne. When he says "I'm not a king, I'm a naval officer," I think "Maybe, but a naval officer with a rather fancier lifestyle, one who spends less time at sea and more with his family than most." There are many professions whose members can reflect that if they have less money than the royal family, at least they have more freedom: but serving naval officers aren't among them. The Duchess of York may not want to be queen, but you must still use the proper form to address her. There's a charming bedtime scene with the family, a bedtime story for the two little princesses, at which the nursery staff are blurred into the background, to suggest that here is a bubble of natural affection with the wider dysfunctional family (I was afraid of my father, says George V, and my sons are going to be afraid of me!): looking at 'the Yorks' two generations on, you can only think that if this is the happy family, that others don't bear thinking about.
The younger of the two daughters (Princess Margaret, therefore) is played by Ramona Marquez (the youngest child of the Outnumbered family). She is only one of a number of very good and very recognisable actors who crop up in this film, and I found it distracting: a sign of my limited engagement with the film rather than of any deficiency in the performances. I was similarly pleasantly distracted by the filming, the astonishing wide angle shots of interiors, the cathedrals and the state apartments wrapping themselves around the characters, Logue's equally palatial (though shabby and partially furnished) consulting rooms, a beautiful image of the house the new King must leave, shot from high above the central atrium, all four walls of the well curved snug as a snail's shell. Outside all is mist and blurred distances, an ingenious way of removing anachronistic intrusions.
One last thought: of course, the film can't actually portray the King's speech as it was. The audience would not stand for the vowels of aristocratic speech in the 1930s; it doesn't even risk the accent of the present-day queen. Paradoxically, the BBC announcer in the opening sequence is given a posher accent than the son of the king, whom he is introducing. I do see that this couldn't be helped, but the same limitation applies to the film as a whole: it changes history to make it more appealing to the viewer.
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 08:51 am (UTC)Best wishes - Bob the Bolder.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 09:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-28 09:59 pm (UTC)This is a good thing. ;-)
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Date: 2011-04-29 08:45 am (UTC)I hope so - I'd be sorry to discourage anyone from seeing a movie that I didn't actively hate, and that so many of my friends have really enjoyed...