Stammer and Deliver
The Kings Speech Directed by Tom Hooper Runtime: 118 min.
George Vs son, the Duke of York, had a speech impediment that hobbled his personal ambitions and made him fear the destiny thrust upon him as Englands king during World War II. I bloody well stammer! shouts George VI (Colin Firth) in The Kings Speecha new piece of hagiography that dares reveal vulgarity, anger and insecurity among the Royals as it dramatizes the kings fear. But the movie also shows his uneasy yet steadfast aspiration by centering on the Kings 1939 radio address announcing Englands 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 heirhe was left-handed, unfed, pinched, knock-kneed and friendlessThe Kings 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 leaders need to project to his subjects while simultaneously focusing on his relationship to the broadcast apparatusin this case, the microphonethat mediates his ideas and intimidates his arrogance. When this idea works, The Kings Speech avoids the usual Anglophilia and approximates the reconsideration of leadership and authority that made Vincere, Marco Bellocchios great Mussollini examination, so tantalizing. But director Tom Hooper lacks Bellocchios mastery; each scene in The Kings 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, theres no visual or emotional imagination to suggest that hes ever seen these icons before. Its 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 films 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. Rushs sometimes admirable modesty affords the witnessing of revelation: The Kings admission, Now we must invade peoples homes and ingratiate ourselves with them; his clarification, Were not a family were a firm; and his brother Edwards complaint, Rights, privileges theyre not the same, bests Peter Morgans pandering script for The Queen.
The films dullest scenes show Colin Firths difficult stammering: He draws out the glottal stop and adds moist-eyed embarrassment that will secure an Oscar nominationalthough theres nothing like Fillipo Timis 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 instructors modest home, surprising his unsuspecting wife (Jennifer Ehle). Its one of the few on record to illustrate the conflicting admiration and unease of common British subjectivitythat weight of tradition that even made the punk band The Sex Pistols loyally pledge God Save the Queen.