Lots of food has been eaten, as always, but let's take a look at Today's Cinema with "The King's Speech".
"The King's Speech", a rather wonderful prestige picture coproduced by the UK Film Council and the Weinstein brothers, stars Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Rush as a future king, a future queen mother, and the king's sports coach. The latter detail is admittedly a sort of fancy. Can I describe "The King's Speech" as "Breaking Away" meets "The Queen" meets "Kiss of the Spider Woman"? Perhaps that is overreaching, but here is the story: a stuttering prince decides to overcome his impediment with the help of an unorthodox speech therapist. If you have ever seen a movie, you know the protaganist must succeed, so no need to wonder about the outcome. The prince is Albert, aka Bertie, aka King George VI, father of the present Queen of England and brother of the now more famous abdicator of the throne and husband of Wallis Simpson. The true story of overcoming the stutter and Edward's abdication of the throne, and how one event demands the success of the other, is the plot.
"The King's Speech" takes place in a London both classically imagined and absolutely real. London of the 20's and 30's is drenched in fog and grey and rain, as befits a fairly old-fashioned picture, and the settings are not only sumptuously austere royal interiors but the shabby chic of a failed actor and struggling Bloomsbury intellectual (incidentally filmed in Lord Davenport's mansion on Portland Place). Serious British cinema tends to take place in the grotty kitchen sinks of council estates or the offices and bedrooms of palaces. What I like about the display of British passion a movie like "The King's Speech" entails is the focus on understated intimate relationships. Much of the film is a two-hander, a gentle and well-written look at the evolution of Albert's relationship with his speech therapist. As Albert is a quivering Oedipal mess whose stammer flourished in the perfect hothouse condition of a repressive family and destiny, and the speech therapist is a kind oddball who immediately demands his royal highness treat him as an equal, reveal the torment of his childhood and sing and curse his way through the therapy, we can see where this is going.
It's comforting to see such attention given to psychotherapy, which is actually what takes place between the future king and his speech therapist. If a stutter is what it takes for a future king to open up about his father's torturous parenting and older brother's disdain, perhaps that's a good thing. Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush are superb, embodying their roles which are supposed to incarnate and critique the idea of inherent superiority based on blood. The would-be King seems a rather lonely fellow whose only real relationship is with his wife and children, here a positive and supportive force. The passion the movie embodies comes from its extreme focus on the subject. A great deal of the time we are watching Albert in enormous close-up, and he becomes an object of pity and scrutiny. As a stammerer in the public eye he is often uncomfortable and unhappy; as a King he is sometimes belligerent, snobby and rash; as a husband and father he is the sort of proud and adoring English man idealized in Dickens, a man happiest in the comfort of home. That is is of royal blood is frequently remarked on- Albert seems quite taken with his inherited superiority- but his defect humanizes him.
In other words, "The King's Speech" dramatizes the journey of a man to success, the simple one of being able to utter a three minute speech about the fate of the nation without stammering. King George is an interesting figure: the younger brother of the pretender to the throne, he was never groomed for anything but a small naval career as prince until his brother abdicated. The story works beautifully: Albert's need to overcome his stutter increases as he nears the throne, a role he is reluctant to take but absolutely must.
The gentle interplay between Albert, or Bertie as he is called by his family and insistently by his therapist, and that therapist, Lionel Logue, is of course the heart of the movie. It's not quite a romance or a buddy picture. While Lionel's unorthodox methods are shown to be superior to those of more established speech therapists (in other words Lionel is the underdog and therefore the cinematic winner) there is still the passionate British insistence on decorum, understanding and suffering one's assigned role honorably. Albert and Lionel riff on their differences, their sessions taking most of the drama and background of the movie, but one of the most important scenes has as a third character a large microphone. Other standout parts are Timothy Spall as a grimacing, sympathetic Churchill and Michael Gambon, as King Edward VII, looking like he walked straight off a coin.
It will win awards- lots of them. Really, how many British costume drama end with the triumph of an underdog who is actually the king- and done well, amid fainting violins, slow, emotional tracking shots, and a grand burst of glory? I was barely holding back the tears. In other words, hello Oscar!
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