Stammer and Deliver

The King’s Speech Directed by Tom Hooper Runtime: 118 min.

George V’s son, the Duke of York, had a speech impediment that hobbled his personal ambitions and made him fear the destiny thrust upon him as England’s king during World War II. “I bloody well stammer!” shouts George VI (Colin Firth) in The King’s Speech—a new piece of hagiography that dares reveal vulgarity, anger and insecurity among the Royals as it dramatizes the king’s fear. But the movie also shows his uneasy yet steadfast aspiration by centering on the King’s 1939 radio address announcing England’s war with Germany. This moment, in which George VI arduously overcomes his stammer and unites his troubled country, briefly raises the film above routine royal idolatry.

Yet by reducing George VI to a frustrated heir—he was left-handed, unfed, pinched, knock-kneed and friendless—The King’s Speech risks a worst vulgarity. It popularizes his personal defects as if to assure audiences that the Royals are just as screwed-up as the rest of us. (Even his faithful wife who came to be known as Queen Mum, shrewdly played by chameleonic Helena Bonham Carter, gets ridiculed as “the Scottish cook.”) This needlessly sentimentalizes a concept that promises something more exacting and original.

Imagine a film about Obama and his love affair with his teleprompter that showed a leader’s need to project to his subjects while simultaneously focusing on his relationship to the broadcast apparatus—in this case, the microphone—that mediates his ideas and intimidates his arrogance. When this idea works, The King’s Speech avoids the usual Anglophilia and approximates the reconsideration of leadership and authority that made Vincere, Marco Bellocchio’s great Mussollini examination, so tantalizing. But director Tom Hooper lacks Bellocchio’s mastery; each scene in The King’s Speech is so poorly staged that its ineptitude sometimes borders on the avant-garde. Hooper overuses rack focus, off-center compositions, fish-eye lenses and an inexpressive steadicam that constantly follows the actors resulting in frivolous, unstable form. No British film has been this inexpressive since Alan Parker. When the King cowers before paintings of his ancestors, there’s no visual or emotional imagination to suggest that he’s ever seen these icons before. It’s hard to know how to look at a movie that blunders its own attempt to probe how the aristocracy looks.

Part of this examination stems from the film’s nearly irreverent source in producer, co-star Geoffrey Rush, an Australian subject who clearly intends to reexamine the royal lineage. Rush plays Lionel Logue, the struggling actor and speech therapist who instructed the King, helping his accession to the throne and to national confidence. Rush’s sometimes admirable modesty affords the witnessing of revelation: The King’s admission, “Now we must invade people’s homes and ingratiate ourselves with them”;  his clarification, “We’re not a family we’re a firm”; and his brother Edward’s complaint, “Rights, privileges they’re not the same,” bests Peter Morgan’s pandering script for The Queen.

The film’s dullest scenes show Colin Firth’s difficult stammering: He draws out the glottal stop and adds moist-eyed embarrassment that will secure an Oscar nomination—although there’s nothing like Fillipo Timi’s thrilling impersonation of the idea of Mussolini. The best scenes convey the indefinable awe that overcomes Logue, especially when King and Queen Mum visit the instructor’s modest home, surprising his unsuspecting wife (Jennifer Ehle). It’s one of the few on record to illustrate the conflicting admiration and unease of common British subjectivity—that weight of tradition that even made the punk band The Sex Pistols loyally pledge “God Save the Queen.”