http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/
"The King's Speech" tells the story of a man compelled to speak to the world with a stammer. It must be painful enough for one who stammers to speak to another person. To face a radio microphone and know the British Empire is listening must be terrifying. At the time of the speech mentioned in this title, a quarter of the Earth's population was in the Empire, and of course much of North America, Europe, Africa and Asia would be listening — and with particular attention, Germany.The king was George VI. The year was 1939. Britain was entering into war with Germany. His listeners required firmness, clarity and resolve, not stammers punctuated with tortured silences. This was a man who never wanted to be king. After the death of his father, the throne was to pass to his brother Edward. But Edward renounced the throne "in order to marry the woman I love," and the duty fell to Prince Albert, who had struggled with his speech from an early age.
In "The King's Speech," director Tom Hooper opens on Albert (Colin Firth), attempting to open the British Empire Exhibition in 1925. Before a crowded arena and a radio audience, he seizes up in agony in efforts to make the words come out right. His father, George V (Michael Gambon), has always considered "Bertie" superior to Edward (Guy Pearce), but mourns the introduction of radio and newsreels, which require a monarch to be seen and heard on public occasions.
At that 1925 speech, we see Bertie's wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), her face filled with sympathy. As it becomes clear that Edward's obsession with Wallis Simpson (Eve Best) is incurable, she realizes her Bertie may face more public humiliation. He sees various speech therapists, one of whom tries the old marbles-in-the-mouth routine first recommended by Demosthenes. Nothing works, and then she seeks out a failed Australian actor named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who has set up a speech therapy practice.
Logue doesn't realize at first who is consulting him. And one of the subjects of the film is Logue's attitude toward royalty, which I suspect is not untypical of Australians; he suggests to Albert that they get on a first-name basis. Albert has been raised within the bell jar of the monarchy and objects to such treatment, not because he has an elevated opinion of himself but because, well, it just isn't done. But Logue realizes that if he is to become the king's therapist, he must first become his friend.
If the British monarchy is good for nothing else, it's superb at producing the subjects of films. "The King's Speech," rich in period detail and meticulous class distinctions, largely sidesteps the story that loomed over this whole period, Edward's startling decision to give up the crown to marry a woman who was already divorced three times. Indeed, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (as they became) would occupy an inexplicable volume of attention for years, considering they had no significance after the Duke's abdication. The unsavory thing is that Wallis Simpson considered herself worthy of such a sacrifice from the man she allegedly loved. This film finds a more interesting story about better people; Americans, who aren't always expert on British royalty, may not necessarily realize that Albert and wife Elizabeth were the parents of Queen Elizabeth II. God knows what Edward might have fathered.
Director Tom Hooper makes an interesting decision with his sets and visuals. The movie is largely shot in interiors, and most of those spaces are long and narrow. That's unusual in hi storical dramas, which emphasize sweep and majesty and so on. Here we have long corridors, a deep and narrow master control room for the BBC, rooms that seem peculiarly oblong. I suspect he may be evoking the narrow, constricting walls of Albert's throat as he struggles to get words out.
The film largely involves the actors Colin Firth, formal and decent, and Geoffrey Rush, large and expansive, in psychological struggle. Helena Bonham Carter, who can be merciless (as in the "Harry Potter" films), is here filled with mercy, tact and love for her husband; this is the woman who became the much-loved Queen Mother of our lifetimes, dying in 2002 at 101. As the men have a struggle of wills, she tries to smooth things (and raise her girls Elizabeth and Margaret). And in the wider sphere, Hitler takes power, war comes closer, Mrs. Simpson wreaks havoc, and the dreaded day approaches when Bertie, as George VI, will have to speak to the world and declare war.
Hooper's handling of that fraught scene is masterful. Firth internalizes his tension and keeps the required stiff upper lip, but his staff and household are terrified on his behalf as he marches toward a microphone as if it is a guillotine. It is the one scene in the film that must work, and it does, and its emotional impact is surprisingly strong. At the end, what we have here is a superior historical drama and a powerful personal one. And two opposites who remain friends for the rest of their lives.
Note: The R rating refers to Logue's use of vulgarity. It is utterly inexplicable. This is an excellent film for teenagers.
Cast & Credits
King George VI - Colin Firth
Lionel Logue - Geoffrey Rush
Queen Elizabeth - Helena Bonham Carter
King Edward VIII - Guy Pearce
Winston Churchill - Timothy Spall
Archbishop Lang - Derek Jacobi
Queen Mary - Claire Bloom
King George V - Michael Gambon
The Weinstein Co. presents a film directed by Tom Hooper. Written by David Seidler. Running time: 118 minutes. Rated R (for language).
The King's Speech
Although it doesn't cut quite as deep as it might, Tom Hooper's film is fraught and fascinating with some excellent performances.
By Sukhdev Sandhu 5:00PM GMT 06 Jan 2011
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Rating: * * * *
At first, The King’s Speech, directed by Tom Hooper, looks awfully familiar, a musty historical drama full of monarchs and period costumes and atmospheric fog. Peer a bit closer though, and it’s a thoroughly modern tale, the true-life story of a king’s efforts to overcome his stammer in order to face his public, constructed like a contemporary makeover narrative.The chap in need of help is Albert, Duke of York (Colin Firth). For as long as anyone can remember he’s had difficulties enunciating. His father, King George V (Michael Gambon), is an emotional despot who mistakes chiding for medicine. Real doctors are of little help either: they stuff Albert’s mouth with marbles and tell him that smoking will relax his lungs.
Nothing seems to work. Albert struggles even to tell bedtime stories to his children. He mooches around as if he’s seen the future: it’s grey. The top hat he sports at social functions appears to droop like a wilted flower. He sinks to new sloughs of despond after he delivers a speech at the 1925 British Empire Exhibition; it’s so nervous and jolting it can’t help but, to our ears, prefigure the end of empire.
In desperation, Albert and his wife (Helena Bonham Carter) seek help from an unlikely source: an unsuccessful Australian actor named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who is working in London as a speech therapist. To say they don’t get on is an understatement. One is a commoner, the other a future monarch. One comes from Down Under, the other is accustomed to looking down at people as they bow before him.
The tension between them is at least as much temperamental as it is cultural or economic. Logue prizes informality. He calls Albert “Bertie”, begins one of their sessions by asking him if he knows any jokes, insists – rather boldly – “In here, it’s better if we’re equals.”
This Gok Wan-like figure performs a reverse Pygmalion-ism by asking Albert to become less posh. In so doing, he’s also anticipating the present day when the Royal Family maintains a Twitter account, appears in the pages of Hello!, and seems sometimes to be only marginally more aristocratic than the likes of Cheryl Cole or Alan Sugar.
The double-handers between them, courtesy of screenplay writer David Seidler, are fraught and fascinating affairs. Logue’s spacious yet rather shabby office in Harley Street becomes a battlefield as the pair spar and joust. “My game, my castle, my rules,” insists the Australian. But Albert, for long stretches, isn’t having it. Stomping out at first, even when he returns, he’s often grudging and sullen.
Their encounters turn into therapy sessions. Logue’s belief that stammering has psychological as well as physical causes seems, in some measure, to be borne out by Albert’s revelation that he was left-handed as a boy but had been forced into becoming a right-hander. When he was young he’d also had to wear metal splints for his knock knees.
A new image of him emerges: a man without friends, one who fears he may suffer from the same epilepsy as his brother, and who frets that he might, rather like his ancestor “Mad King George the Third”, be known as “Mad King George the Stammerer”.
It can’t be easy to learn how to stutter. But Firth’s vocal performance is wholly believable, and he is absorbing throughout, out-plumbing the depths of isolation he achieved in A Single Man. He never tries to soften his character or to make him a mere object of pity.
Rather, Albert is prone to self-pity, to lashing out, and to snobbish disdain. When he cries, “I’m a naval officer, not a king”, the effect is as resonant as Eliot’s Prufrock lamenting: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
Hopefully, Firth’s excellence – and Rush’s, too; his Logue has a touch of the spiv, but also rueful eyes that have never forgotten the shell-shocked soldiers he treated when he first arrived in Europe – won’t obscure the film’s compelling portrait of the evolution of sound in 20th-century Britain.
Hooper’s framing and shot composition often leave something to be desired, but an early close-up of a microphone, resembling nothing so much as a mini-Zeppelin, establishes the critical roles played by new technologies as agents of sonic democratisation.
That’s what makes the 1925 Wembley scene so compelling. Albert’s stammer, the echo in the stadium, the distortion caused by a poor PA system: all combine to create a dissonant medley that, while it mimics the jangle in his head, disobeys the new rules: royalty can no longer afford just to look right; it has to sound right.
Sounding right is something Albert’s older brother, David (Guy Pearce), also fails to do. Crowned as Edward VIII, he’s clearly unsuitable to be head of state; partly because he wishes to marry Wallis Simpson (Eve Best), and partly because he’s happy to turn Balmoral into Charleston, allowing revellers to whoop it up to jazz and rhythm-and-blues music.
This clears the stage for the film’s biggest set-piece: the moment when Albert, now King George VI, has to step up to the microphone and tell the nation that it’s at war with Germany.
Unfortunately, Hooper fluffs this scene. Opting to go for Oscar glory, to create as rousing a strength-through-adversity momentum as he can, he swamps Albert’s words with orchestral music.
This isn’t the film’s only miscue: Pearce looks far too young for his part and doesn’t sound at all English; Timothy Spall as Churchill resembles a distended bulldog who’s been chewing wasps; Bonham Carter and Jennifer Ehle (as Logue’s wife) are under-used.
Still, if The King’s Speech never quite cuts as deeply as it might, it’s at least as enjoyable an exercise in humanising royalty as The Queen or The Young Victoria, one whose emotional pay-off the makers of Supernanny or How to Look Good Naked would surely envy.
Related:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/8223897/The-Kings-Speech-the-real-story.html
http://www.tnr.com/article/film/80948/the-kings-speech-film-royal-mess
The King’s Speech, Seven Magazine review, by Mike McCahill
Seven rating: * * * *
The King’s Speech concerns itself with the historical implications of a stutter. In one corner, it has Colin Firth’s Duke of York, soon to be George VI, wrestling with the speech impediment that has rendered public speaking a nightmare. In the other, we find Hitler, a leader whose very appeal lay in his oratorical skills.
Closer to home, George V (Michael Gambon) is marching towards the gravest of silences, and the Duke’s brother, Edward (Guy Pearce), can talk solely of that Simpson woman. The need for someone to step up to the plate – or radio microphone – grows ever greater. This is a film in which the Empire is threatened not by war, but by dead air.
Drafted in to address this vacuum is Harley Street speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a garrulous Australian with a fondness for garish interior design. The duke’s sessions with Logue form the film’s dramatic meat, but a full British repertory is on hand to observe their progress. Helena Bonham Carter is loving, eccentric, and nigh-perfect casting as the young Queen Mother; Derek Jacobi is a fretting Archbishop of Canterbury, approaching the coronation like a church fête threatened by rain; and Timothy Spall offers a sly Churchill.
You soon intuit why they were drawn to David Seidler’s fine screenplay: its raw material is language itself. Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare becomes a touchstone: Logue auditions as Richard III for a local am-dram group, while George finds some solace in Hamlet.
In the part of real-life troubled prince, Firth continues his series of increasingly skilful variations on a very English stiffness. Last year’s A Single Man, stylish yet silly, looked like a dress rehearsal for major prizes. This could well be his accession: a sustained and wholly sympathetic piece of precision-technical acting that allows us to feel every word catching in George’s throat like a rogue fishbone.
It would be easy to underestimate Rush’s contribution here. Logue is hardly the most fragrant character – he first emerges to the sound of a flushing lavatory – but his role is pristinely clear: to relieve the verbal and emotional constipation central to so many Firth performances, his treatment eventually cueing a most un-kingly torrent of curses.
In such scenes, director Tom Hooper stresses his characters’ vocal rhythms, deploying off-kilter camera choices to suggest George’s unbalance: the king-to-be is rendered dumbstruck at one turn by the looming portraits of his illustrious predecessors.
Like Stephen Frears’s film The Queen, The King’s Speech is a way of getting us to think about the Royal family less as an institution than as individuals weighed down by pomp and circumstance. George struggles with his words, Edward with his deeds, and both realise they must embrace New World modernity – whether American or Antipodean, radio or therapy – if they are to survive.
Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are on hand, with corgis, to assure us there will be a happy ending of sorts, yet this quietly subversive drama approaches royalty with something
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