After Colin Firth's fantastic performance in 'A Single Man' last year, I changed my mind about the actor who until then had appeared in quite a lot of forgettable puff. Despite being a housewife favourite, starring in films like 'Love Actually', 'Bridget Jones' and 'Mamma Mia' aren't going to do a lot for your career from an awards point of view. As such I had seen him as an actor who was still living on the coat tails of being in the BBC television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice some 15 years ago, in which he became something of a sex symbol. In 'A Single Man' though he was extraordinary. He played a complex and tense character in a film entirely driven by his own performance. So when the acclaim for 'A Kings Speech' started to roll in before its release I hadn't much doubt that Firth was well able to give a performance worthy of Oscar consideration.'The King's Speech' is on the surface a period drama about the recently-deceased royals of Great Britain. It is so much more than this. Colin Firth plays the soon-to-be George the 6th (aka Bertie), a man with a stammer that impedes his ability to publically speak. His father - George the 5th - sits on the throne and his brother is next in line, but soon circumstances conspire to make it clear that he will be the next king. With war against Hitler looming, Bertie's wife (Helena Bonham Carter) seeks help for him in the form of Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue - Geoffrey Rush.
This film could easily have turned into a lot of things that would have turned me off. We could have had a film that lovingly portrayed the royal family and fawned over their lives in a Hello! magazine style - at no point did I feel like it pandered to the "Aren't they lovely" crowd. We could have had a film where the relationship between the Australian and the King-to-be had been portrayed as a conflict of extremes, yet never did the story reduce itself to a stereotypical depiction of Australians as a people with a base wit and in-your-face confrontational 'charm'. Instead of any of this, the film tells a charming story about a man who is forced to confront his personal demons and rise to a role that neither he nor anyone around him ever wanted him to have. As far as I can gather it is very true to historical events, basing its depiction of the relationship between Bertie and Lionel on the speech therapist's memoirs.
Colin Firth's performance is outstanding, I have no idea how an actor manages to make himself stammer while at the same time emoting and getting through his lines. I'd just start laughing at myself if it was me. He plays the role of George the 6th as a man who is deeply insecure, but one who is prone to outbursts revealing his ease in his position within the British establishment. Firth is not the only actor worthy of praise here, Derek Jacobi plays the Archbishop of Canterbury and represents the dark side of the British establishment conspiring in the background while putting on a face of deference to the monarch. He's brilliantly two-faced. The inclusion of such a blatantly evil character who appears to manipulate the otherwise 'good' king and his wife was the only part of the film that made me question its portrayal of the royals. It seemed as if the film was going out of its way to try depict the royals as ordinary people while the 'establishment' is in fact the Archbishop, politicians and their other hangers on. This was a very minor point though, as everything else was brilliant.
I'm going to put on my Conspiracy Theory hat for a very short time now. Recently the director of 'Made in Dagenham' was vocal over the rating of his film as a 15 certificate. He claimed that thousands of kids who might otherwise get something out of the film have been denied the chance to see it. He claimed that the decision could well have been rooted in the subject matter of his film, and that the BBFC were motivated to deny a film about workplace rebellion a mass audience at a time of economic crisis. The BBFC responded that the film was classified a 15 as a result of frequent use of the word 'fuck'. In the case of 'The King's Speech' though, the BBFC argue that a similar level of usage of the word 'fuck' is in fact permissible at the '12a' certificate. They argue that the language is used in isolated bursts, not in anger and in an "unusual and very specific speech therapy context,". I contend perhaps that the BBFC felt a film about the royal family, in the year of a royal wedding and hotly tipped for Oscar success, couldn't possibly be doomed to the restricted audience that a 15 certificate would give it. Whereas a film about the oiks rebelling against their masters doesn't need to be seen by anyone in their formative years. Class war anyone?
Part coming of age tale, part period drama, part comedy, part bromance, part historical biography - there's a lot in this film for a lot of different people. In fact, when I saw it the cinema appeared to be populated with people who probably haven't been to see a film since George 6th was actually king - people who insisted on 'tutting' for some reason when an old newsreel of Hitler was shown. Be you royalist or republican, fan of Firth's or not - you will enjoy 'The King's Speech'. You need to see this film.
As an ageing armchair Marxist, the prospect of seeing a film which on the surface offers sympathy to the monarchy was not entirely an happy one.
ReplyDeleteHowever, i watched the Kings Speech and I concur with your sentiments.
I must add that the inadequacies of a bunch of in-breds and ponces actually shone through and exposed how fragile was their hold on all their ill gotten privilages in the 1930's.
Had Logue not been in the right place ( for them ) at the right time, who knows what would have happened to the Windsors et al?
Don't forget that in their ranks were a number of nazi sympathisers.
The film is of useful historic significance and definitely worth watching.