movie: The King's Speech
Dec. 14th, 2010 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacA 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.
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.
