movie: The King's Speech

[calimac]

A movie like this was kind of made for me, so I went to see it instead of waiting for it to come to me in silver disc form.

Certainly the acting is excellent. For all his eccentricities, Lionel is a blander man than Geoffrey Rush is normally wont to play, but unlike Jack Nicholson or John Lithgow at similar points in their careers, Rush hasn't forgotten how to underact, so he does very well. Colin Firth has gone believably stuffy and middle-aged, and he never ever allows the king's stutter to become mechanical or predictable. Helena Bonham Carter is appropriately regal. Guy Pearce disappears into King Edward so completely that, aside from a certain physical resemblance, I'd never have guessed it was him. On the other hand, Timothy Spall, who was born to play the cretinous henchmen of evil overlords, and usually does, both looks and sounds utterly ridiculous as Winston Churchill.

I found the plot vaguely unsatisfactory. It was never clear to me what Lionel was accomplishing by heavily nudging the king that his father couldn't accomplish by barking at him. In rather the same manner as HBO's The Gathering Storm made British resistance in WW2 a function of the leaks Ralph Wigram was sending Churchill from the Foreign Office, this movie treats it as a function of King George making a good speech. Thankfully the speech marks no transformation. The king is just as terrified of this speech he makes at the end of the movie as he'd been of the speech he makes 15 years earlier at the beginning of the movie: it's just that this time he manages to get through it, successfully but not with any miraculous fluency. And the stirring music played underneath (not very far underneath: it's very conspicuous) as he does it is the main section of the Allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh: dark, somber music in A minor, played too slowly, as is customary.

But the function of that ending exemplifies the way the movie treats history. The basic facts and succession of events are accurate, but many of the details are wrong, and the feel of them is even wronger. I expect nothing better of a historical movie, of course, but I can still beef about it. At the end, when Lionel congratulates the king on this, his first speech of the war, they sound almost cheerful, as if they're talking of the war as a historical event that's already over, which is what it is now, and not the descent into a dark abyss whose other side, however much hoped for and even assumed, was still unfathomable, which is what it was at the time. The king's father, the previous King George, has only one narrative function in the film, which is to deliver to his son an expository lump of stuff he already knows. I winced at that.

Most painful to me of all, though, was the scene where Baldwin resigns as prime minister, which was so completely and utterly off in every way, it would take as long as the movie to describe it all.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it yet, I plan to see it at the weekend.

The Gathering Storm, or as it is known in this house "The Churchill fanfic movie" is the only film I know where the beginning of WWII is portrayed as a happy ending, so it will be interesting if weird to see another.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I look forward to your expert evaluation.

Your comment on the beginning of WW2 as a happy ending reminds me of the famous comment, I forget whose, on Sam Moskowitz's fan history, The Immortal Storm, that it's the only history in which the beginning of WW2 comes as an anti-climax.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I absolutely agree with everything you say about it. And I'm glad I had warning before the Baldwin resignation, because it stopped me from expostulating in the cinema. (What? What? What were they thinking?)

Colin Firth can really act, when he's given the chance to do so. But what George VI did to help defeat Hitler was stay there, in London, during the Blitz. That should have been worth a mention. The film kept asserting he was brave, that's what demonstrates it.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

I've been doing some research on Europe in the 1930s, for a graphic novel (or series of such) that I've been planning. And in particular, about Churchill in that period. At the time, he was pretty much a lone voice expressing concern about the developments in Germany, so much so that he was disregarded as a political power. So, with that in mind, I could see how in his point-of-view, the beginning of open hostilities would be a relief: that the realities of the situation were finally acknowledged, the vindication that he had been right. But not a "happy ending" (or beginning, as the case may be).

Of course, all that is off point of your comments about the movie. From your description of it, the film makers did not do a very good job of conveying the main point: that as the country headed into war, they needed a strong voice from their leaders, a voice that could inspire them to face their trials. Sounds like the filmmakers got lost in the characters and kind of forgot that point. I guess I'll have to see the film, in order to find out if I'm right on that.

So, I'm taking it that although you didn't find the film to be flat out awful, you aren't enthusiastic about it?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I was not as enthused by the movie as some of its reviewers were, no. But it was well-made, and rather than forgetting that "the country ... needed a strong voice from their leaders," the movie says rather the opposite: that getting the king to give a good speech was absolutely vital to the war effort. A little bit overemphasized rather than under, I thought. Doesn't go quite so far as implying, "If it hadn't been for Logue's speech therapy, we might have lost to Hitler," but it sort of vaguely nods in that direction.

The particular quality of Churchill's firm confidence in the face of a dire situation is best conveyed by the closing paragraphs of the first volume of his WW2 memoirs, conveying his feelings on taking office as prime minister in May 1940.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

Ah! Thanks for the explication about the movie's approach then.

And thanks for the link to Chuchill's statement. I've been so much time looking at the other end of the business (I'm still focusing on the early '30s period), that I hadn't gotten to looking at the 1940 moments.

[(Anonymous)]

We just saw the film today. I enjoyed it, but it seemed to lurch at times.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Bother, I was logged out.