Starring: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham-Carter, Guy Pearce Director: Tom Hooper Category: IIB
With the award season frenzy over, most will have heard about what makes The King's Speech tick. If the Oscars it won are any guide, the film's achievement must lie either in the acting, primarily Colin Firth's (right) incredibly nuanced performance as stammering monarch George VI, or director Tom Hooper's deft delivery of a lush British-period film oozing human warmth and likeability.
Valid as these may be, the key to understanding the appeal of The King's Speech lies elsewhere. It's to be found in a scene buried in the middle of the film, in which the future George VI (or Bertie, as he's mostly known on screen) gets an earful from his father, George V (Michael Gambon). Having just shown his son how to deliver an eloquent Christmas address on the radio, the patriarch laments how the modern royals are effective only if they can 'invade people's homes and ingratiate with them'.
And invade Bertie does, in one of The King's Speech's most comical scenes. He and his wife, Elizabeth - the future Queen Mother, her arrogance rendered splendidly by Helena Bonham-Carter - visit the home of his speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) for an ice-thawing session after an earlier falling out. A conversation re-establishes their bond. Startled by his wife's unexpected return home, Logue tries to hide Bertie away and says, 'I haven't told her - about us.' A bromance is thus asserted, one that revives the dramatic chestnut of a relationship struck across class lines.
What makes The King's Speech compelling drama is David Seidler's screenplay, which enhances the real-life story of Bertie's Logue-assisted recovery of speech with sharp observations about someone who finds himself wrestling with a regard and responsibility he doesn't relish. Firth portrays a man with a self-doubting complex brought about by his impediment and the long shadows cast by his authoritarian father and worldly elder brother (Edward VIII, played as a playboy bully by Guy Pearce).
Bertie's dalliance with a commoner is all very well, but The King's Speech stands as the latest in a genre of film that seeks to re-establish the British royal family as the country's guardian and moral compass.