Partner and I saw “The King's Speech” on Sunday. Geoffrey Rush is especially notable as the nonconformist speech therapist who says disrespectful things, but says them with love. Firth is the Duke of York / King George VI, full of bottled-up rage, but a pukka sahib nonetheless. It's probably a harder acting job than Rush's, but it isn't as flashy.
There are lots of fun actors in the bits-and-pieces roles: Timothy Spall (Peter Pettigrew from the Harry Potter franchise), shaking his jowls like mad as Winston Churchill; Anthony Andrews (babe, where have you been since “Brideshead Revisited”?) as Stanley Baldwin; Derek Jacobi as the unbearable Archbishop of Canterbury; Helena Bonham-Carter as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, plump and sugar-sweet and sure of herself; Michael Gambon, dumping the Dumbledore routine to portray a nasty crusty George V; and Guy Pearce, playing the Prince of Wales as a Jazz Age creep.
I commented to Partner on the way home, as we slogged through the snow, that I remembered something called “The Woman I Love,” which portrayed the Prince of Wales (the ethereal Richard Chamberlain) as a misunderstood romantic. In “The King's Speech," the Prince is a dimwitted simp, thoughtless and easily manipulated.
Funny how attitudes change.
I recently watched “The Queen” again. Watching Helen Mirren is like watching QEII herself; she has exactly the right reserve, the dry pursing of the lips, the very light touch of coarseness (deerstalking, corgis, big ugly scarves).
But she's a myth. All of the royals are myths. I think Americans like me mythologize them more than the British do. They personify whole periods of history: the Victorian Era, the Edwardian era, the Tudor period for God's sake!
But they don't always personify what they want to personify.
If you asked Elizabeth II what she thought she stood for, she'd say something stolid and proper like: England. The United Kingdom. The Commonwealth. Traditional values.
And the real answer would be: The stubborn maintenance of outdated attitudes. The necessity of being polite to your grandma, even though you disagree with her about everything.
And, most of all, the importance of always carrying a handbag.
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