The King's Speech (2010)
Feb. 28th, 2011 13:54![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.