The King’s Speech

Expectations of Oscars have built up around The King's Speech like an aura. It will be a surprise if it doesn't bag best picture, best actor, and best supporting actor. In this case, it probably deserves all three.

I say "probably" only because I haven't seen most of the contenders. I will hazard a guess that this is one of those (non-holiday) movies you would be willing to watch again and again over the years. That is hardly typical with Oscar winners. Breathes there a man with a soul so dead who err to himself hath said: gee, I'd like to watch Titanic again?

TKS tells the story of George the VI, who is crowned when his brother abdicates. British monarchs long ago surrendered the power of lopping off heads in return for the cleaner if less gratifying duty of giving speeches. G6 has a speech impediment. Lionel Logue, a back street therapist with no letters after his name, liberates the king's vocal cords just in time. Speaking into a microphone the size of a CD player, G6 rouses the Hobbits to stand up to Hitler. Let that stand for a synopsis.

TKS is a brilliant production. The casting is rock solid. Colin Firth was born with a face and manner that needs only a crown, a crisis, and a stutter to complete it. Geoffrey Rush is our greatest living actor. It is only in the most nominal sense that his role in the film is "supporting" rather than "leading". Helen Bonham Carter, looking as always as if she fell out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, doesn't really deserve nomination for best supporting actress. It's not that she wasn't damn near perfect in the role. She was. It's just that her role was too small for that. Even the young actors who played the children of the two families were excellent.

The only mistake was casting Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill. Spall was Wormtail in the Potter movies! Watching Helen Bonham Carter, I was never once reminded of Bellatrix Lestrange. Watching Spall in TKS, I kept expecting him to transfigure into a rat.

The dialogue was brilliant, as was the script as a whole. The drama of a royal family in crisis takes place against the backdrop of Hitler's rise and the coming of war. George the VI can't get his words out. Hitler can. The neat symmetry between a very ordinary man struggling against a vulgar disability and the extraordinary role that man is compelled to play in history is exquisite. It there is such a thing as the heroic, this movie gets it right.

The climax of the film, when the King finally speaks, is about as good as modern cinema gets. All drama aspires to the perfection of perfect music. The score is the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony. I have long loved that piece of music. I love it more now.

I won't spoil the fun here by explaining that the movie gets the royal family and Churchill all wrong. If you are curious, see Christopher Hitchens' review at Slate. But first, see The King's Speech.

Comments

[A.I.]

Indeed "King's Speech" was excellent.

I made a point of skipping "Titanic" and, if Cameron's insufferably long and pompous Oscar acceptance speech was any indication, I avoided spending 3 hours and 14 minutes watching a story that could easily have been told well in 2 hours or less.

[KB]

Titanic was maybe worth a single watch, just for the scale of the thing. And the engine room shots were fantastic! Otherwise, it was utterly forgettable.