The King’s Speech
Director: Tom Hooper
Starring: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush
Runtime: 118 mins
Rating: ****
“Contains strong language in a speech therapy context.” A warning that was added after the makers of The King’s Speech successfully lobbied to have the film’s rating taken down from a 15 to a 12A, it must be one of the funniest caveats ever attached to a movie by the British Board of Film Classification. It means that when a stammering George VI is asked by his speech therapist to try something different, Colin Firth’s torrent of Shits and Fucks will be heard by our nation’s children. But rather than feeling gleeful success at having sneaked into something naughty, they’ll most likely find it embarrassing to hear their parents laughing hysterically.
Whether you want it to or not, it’s also one of many moments that might immediately recall another British film. Not The Madness of King George, which his highness’ speech impediment is at one stage compared to; nor The Queen, to which some might want to see Hooper’s film – which also stresses the role of politicians and the media in the monarchy’s changing relationship to the public – as a kind of distant prequel. Instead, I instantly thought of Bridget Jones’ Diary: because Renée Zellwegger’s own swearing also capitalises on how funny it can be to play with notions of British politeness.
Of course, Colin Firth was also a significant part of that film, making it one of many historical and cultural pieces of baggage The King’s Speech has to carry, reminding us of what generic conventions it holds onto, as well as what made Firth famous enough in the first place to get a role like this. He always provides an introspective take on the upper-class, hesitant Englishmen, and watching Firth play the King of upper-class, hesitant Englishmen is another achievement for him.
The film succeeds moreover by recognising its hero not in the King, but in Lionel Logue. Embodied by Geoffrey Rush, Logue was the speech therapist who helped George VI (or, as he preferred to call him, Bertie) overcome the weight of his responsibilities as well as help as his stuttering. He is quite overtly not a Professor Higgins, but instead someone whose experience with shell-shocked soldiers from World War I allows him to act as a kind of psychoanalyst to a man unable to escape the shadows of his monumental father and rebellious older brother (excellently played by Michael Gambon and Guy Pearce).
In its main focus, the film’s structure is simultaneously unusual and conventional. It consists of the build-up to an event where moral courage would be tested: but this moment is a radio broadcast, rather than World War II itself. Appropriately, the mood of its finale is serious, with sprinklings of humour, rather than rousing. The central conceit – that the speech of the title refers to an event, as well as to George VI’s stammer – feels a little too obviously theatrical amidst typical montages sequences. The dynamic between Bertie and Lionel osciallates between techniques from the cinema and the stage. We’re told that the central pair became lifelong friends, but the strength of this filmic type of narrative closure is undermined in places by a more subtle interplay between Rush and Firth that seems to be governed by the rules of a play.
The film does, however, succeed in reinvigorating our ideas about historical drama in any form, thanks to stylish direction from Tom Hooper, careful production design and expert cinematography: merely the framing of the King suggests both his claustrophobia and his self-importance. This is a story about public figures, and quite self-consciously plays with the comic personas of future Queen Mother the Duchess of York (played tenderly by Helena Bonham Carter) and Winston Churchill, who is first heard by voice alone, shown only from behind before the reveal of Timothy Spall’s face, and whose domineering presence almost kicks Neville Chamberlain out of 1930s history.
By contrast, Logue was an Australian without high-standing qualifications; an outsider who apparently became one of the King’s closest friends and saved him where others had failed, and so the only way in which he can be portrayed in the script is as a fairly remarkable and lovely person. This is something which Geoffrey Rush happens to be very good at. Though it feels quite different to his usual work, his performance is thoroughly convincing. The last shot of the film lingers superbly on Logue’s face, and intriguingly suggests that the world of this movie is not one in which his character’s own subjectivity can really be penetrated.
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this is typical nouse writing. stop trying to impress me and write properly