starlady: "I can hear the sound of empires falling." (burning empires)
[personal profile] starlady
The King's Speech. Dir. Tom Hooper, 2010.

I went to see this with one of my roommates on Saturday night and we both really enjoyed it. It's another of those competent films that do what they promise on the tin and send everyone home more or less happy. Just in passing, let me mention that it was funded in part by the UK Film Council, which David Cameron has axed as part of his budget cuts.

As someone I know observed on Twitter, it's also another movie about the anxiety of whether the white man will be heard or not (I'll give you one guess as to the answer of that question), but being probably one of the most privileged white men in history doesn't protect you from suffering emotional abuse at the hands of your family (and physical abuse at the hands of your first nanny), or from having a significant disability, and Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush both put in performances that transcend the screenplay. I agreed with Anthony Lane's take on it, that in the scenes in which the two of them cagily expose their own wounds to each other, the movie gestures towards the truly powerful and emotional, and in those moments it did actually make me think about power and class and family and fear. The rest of the movie generally pulls Firth and Rush back to earth, though there is a certain enjoyment to be had in watching the leading lights of the British thespian establishment (as usual, I sat there matching up who had played who in the Harry Potter movies) do their usual good job playing a rather catty elite lurching towards a war it doesn't want while trying to find a king it can unite behind. I think, aside from the scenes that Lane identifies, that there's one other moment in which the movie does better than it realizes, when George VI and his family watch a newsreel of one of Hitler's rallies right after seeing the footage of HM's coronation. The juxtaposition between Hitler's demagoguery and Bertie's hard-won ability to get a single sentence out fluidly is rather trite and conservative on some level, but for me the speech at the end (which, WTF Oscar, should not have been played over the best picture nominees montage) isn't just about Bertie struggling to make it, but also about the content of the speech itself. Someone had to oppose Hitler, and in growing to fill his role George VI showed real courage and a sense of duty that was notably absent in his older brother David, the erstwhile Edward VIII. It's interesting to watch, at the beginning and end of the movie, the banks of BBC equipment showing all the places in the empire to which the service was broadcasting, most of which no longer exist as such. As Lane also notes, while Logue never vocalizes it (and we never learn, crucially, what made him decamp from Australia to the imperial metropole), his life and his sessions with Bertie are an eloquent testimony to many things that were wrong with the empire (I actually wondered whether in real life Logue was tempted to ask Churchill about Gallipolli whenever they were in the same room together) and with Britain at the time, and none of us should weep for the passing of the British Empire, over which Bertie eventually presided. The movie makes me think of it all as linked, even if it's not doing that intentionally.

The other thing is that the movie also made me aware of the extent to which so many of these people and locations have become, at least to some extent, iconic: I can recognize Balmoral now, as well as Sandringham, or at least the way Hollywood portrays them, and watching Princess Elizabeth flit about the edges of this movie (the corgis are apparently an eternal obsession) I was reminded multiple times of watching her sixty years later in The Queen, particularly the scene in which her private secretary tells Tony Blair that being king killed her father, and she's never forgotten it. Or in the scene when Bertie faces his accession council, and stares at the portrait of Victoria on the opposite wall, I thought of Emily Blunt doing much the same in The Young Victoria. The movie is fairly intelligent about the royal family's workings--Bertie tells his father that it's not a family, it's a firm, and he's right--and I liked that too. Seeing the monarchy as an institution that has had to actively battle for its life is a view that we ought to encounter more, I think.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 02:35 (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
I have to say, the only point where I felt distinctly pulled out of the narrative was when David and Wallis were on screen. Enough so that I ended up reading up on the pair after I saw the film.

Mainly David's first scene where he is putting Wallis above dinner duty and the scene at Balmoral. By the time Elizabeth asks if she's behaved badly toward Wallis, I agreed. As if there was something inherently repugnant with the Woman greeting the guests. Not to mention the insinuation her 'hold' on him being a result of techniques she'd learned at the asian base her ex was stationed at.

I was left wanting to research why Elizabeth was granted dispensation to marry Albert, but not Wallis & David. It seemed ludicrous to me that the CoE of all religions would have a divorce hangup, and Elizabeth had shown they were willing to budge on the title. So I was left feeling a bit like I could empathize with David and his expectation that people would eventually accept the situation.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 05:20 (UTC)
recessional: a dorky-looking young woman with huge glasses and a camera (personal; i am indeed a dorkface)
From: [personal profile] recessional
But yes, given the circumstances in which the CoE was created, the "no divorce" rule in the royal family does seem rather ridiculous.

Not really - the received-narrative we HAVE was that it was about "divorce", but it wasn't; it was about annulment. Divorce as we understand it simply did not exist in Henry VIII's world, and it never would have occurred to him to seek it; he wanted an annulment from Katherine on the basis of affinity (she had married his brother, making them siblings). As we understand it, he never "divorced" anyone: he annulled his marriage to Katherine of Aragon on that basis (which was actually theologically sound - they had gotten around it originally due to Papal Dispensation, which is rules-lawyering at its best), and he annulled his marriage to Anne of Cleves on the basis of non-consummation and . . . something else, I forget.

It took quite a while even in England for divorce to become desacrilized enough for divorce as we understand it (one or more persons who had an entirely valid and binding marriage deciding they wanted no more to do with each other and entirely legally separating from one another) to EXIST.

This has been your pedantic mediaevalist moment for the evening.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 05:42 (UTC)
recessional: a drawing/painting of a dark-haired lady in mediaeval clothing (personal; mediaevalism et my brain)
From: [personal profile] recessional
A lot of very odd behaviour made a lot more sense to me when I realized how many places and cultures were (and even "are") operating from a received religious culture very different from the current, Protestant-dominated, non-sacramental ideas "normal" to "white western culture" (whatever that "neutral" culture we're supposed to have is, you know *waves hand*)*.

The mediaevals and Early-Moderns thought that by getting married, you were permanently changing the nature of your soul, and tying it to this other person. The Anglican idea of marriage long maintained the emotional thrust of that, even as the technicality leaned in towards the more Protestant norm.

Then, even when the Anglicans had thoroughly thrown off the sacramental part, the intense sense of not just "moral mistake" but actual spiritual violation seems to have remained. It's kind of fascinating.


*wherein divorce is BAD, but is bad on a earthly moral scale, rather than essentially doing violence to your soul because it's not POSSIBLE to change your soul BACK to the way it was before you were married

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 09:49 (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
I find the whole title thing completely mystifying. Elizabeth only had the rank of Consort, which is why her own daughter became Elizabeth 2 instead of 3. That to me implied an imbalance in their status. But that appears to be normal for Britain? I dunno.

There was precedent for allowing a commoner to marry him that involved a similar (to my eyes) title imbalance, which David tried to suggest be used. (Which is what Camilla ended up getting.) And meanwhile, the idea of *not* marrying a european princess seemed completely acceptable at that point.

So I sort of wondered, if he had not made other unpopular decisions, if he would have gotten permission to marry Wallis.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 13:19 (UTC)
pseudo_tsuga: (Default)
From: [personal profile] pseudo_tsuga
I haven't seen the movie yet so I can't comment, but did you see the film clip where Helena Bonham Carter calls Helen Mirren her daughter because of the roles they portrayed? It's really amusing.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 05:14 (UTC)
recessional: a photo image of feet in sparkly red shoes (Default)
From: [personal profile] recessional
it's also another movie about the anxiety of whether the white man will be heard or not

A stutter is a significant disability, so while he's a white male disabled person, no, it's not entirely a privileged narrative. (Fully admitting I am a bit defensive on this point due to Persons Dear To Me who struggle with the fairly significant disability of not being able to communicate in 90% of their life; as someone who's brainwiring winds up with the same fault for different reasons, I know how awful it is, and mine isn't an All The Time thing.)

Otherwise I entirely agree. I think what really touched me is that, the narrative of the White Male aside, Bertie was played as really genuinely human: frail, fallible, fucked up, loyal in strange ways, and very vulnerable, often in ways that aren't usually part of the White Male Narrative. (I admit it: I teared up at the "I'm a naval officer, it's all I know." bit.)

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 05:34 (UTC)
sasha_feather: Retro-style poster of skier on pluto.   (Default)
From: [personal profile] sasha_feather
it's also another movie about the anxiety of whether the white man will be heard or not

Now I'm curious what other movies fit this bill! I mean, obviously most movies are about white men, but I am curious about movies that deal with the issue of being heard or of finding one's voice, which is an interesting theme.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 05:37 (UTC)
sasha_feather: Retro-style poster of skier on pluto.   (Default)
From: [personal profile] sasha_feather
Ah, yeah, I see. Violence or social action could be interpreted as speech. Which, can be almost any movie.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-02-28 23:21 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] contrariety.livejournal.com
I agree!

I actually think the concept of kingship as a job is really critical to the movie. The story of Bertie, A Man Becoming a King blah blah blah, is conceptually off-putting to me - kings really don't matter that much anymore, so who cares? But the story of Bertie, a guy who's been stuck with a job whose only important feature is something he happens to really suck at, but who nonetheless wants to do the best he can with it, is a very sympathetic one to me. There's this national British mythos about Britain in WWII as a nation of ordinary people all pulling together to do their little bit of the war right and stick it to Hitler, and in a weird way this movie sort of made Bertie a part of that to me.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 19:15 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] starlady38.livejournal.com
Yeah, I did sort of keep thinking about equality and rank and whatnot--the times when Bertie can let it go, versus the times when he can't, and how David's dilemma sort of epitomized that, how they were caught between two opposing worldviews in a way. It's interesting.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 16:43 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] merin-chan.livejournal.com
>>and none of us should weep for the passing of the British Empire, over which Bertie eventually presided

I was also really interested in the scenes of mediated empire in this film, and thought that Logue's sometimes pointed references to his Australian-ness were a nice touch. But I have to say, at least in some parts of (white English) Canada, the movie has brought up a kind of nostalgia for British rule. The CBC Winnipeg news last night did a post-Oscars feature on a speech George VI gave in Winnipeg a few months before the one in the movie, promoting imperial solidarity, etc. The feature included interviews with nice old ladies who recalled fondly how they had been given little flags at the age of six (in 1939) and encouraged to cheer the king. It ended with a toast "To the King!" from the governor's mansion in Winnipeg. And I'm thinking, what a strange confluence of Hollywood glamour and history went into this news story...

I don't have an actual critique or anything. I really liked the movie. I just find the "royals mania" that's going on lately (especially with William and Kate planning to spend their honeymoon in Canada) a bit odd.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-03-01 19:14 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] starlady38.livejournal.com
I perpetually find the royalty nostalgia a bit odd, particularly in the form of royalty mania that it takes here in the States. Guys, remember how we fought a war to get rid of these people? Remember that? No? …Well, okay then.

And yeah, the mediated empire thing was really interesting. I wound up thinking of Lydia Liu's comments on 'sovereign thinking' and how it haunts our post-monarchical age, as well as James Hevia's comments on the global cultural sphere that the British empire in particular created.

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