Mar 30, 2011 01:39 AM
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What do you do with a king who is from that royal family who established a great empire where the sun never set? What if the king, Duke of York at present, later to become King George VI (Colin Firth), comes from that nation where verbal and written articulation reached their great heights and yet the king falls short of perfect verbal articulation and stammers, in spite of the efforts of many speech therepists?
Well, fiddly problem, wouldn’t you say? A nagging thorn in the bottom is what a lifetime of losses and pains are to the hoi polloi. Great enough a problem to bring tears in the eyes of the king’s wife, to-be Queen Elizabeth (Helena Bonham), and embarrassment to the listeners. The movie doesn’t let us to sentimentalize over it while it shows this human face of the royals.
The opening scene shows the King botching up his speech at an occasion and the the movie glides us soon after opening in medias res to this Australian therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who tells the lady—the Duchess who has come under the alias of Mrs Johnson and who uses the royal ‘we’—to make her “hubby pop by” and for whom it is “my game, my turf, my rules” and has guts enough to call the previous therapists “Idiots” and to call the King “Bertie” (as in a Wodehouse novel (and in a Wodehouse novel a person with a stammer is advised to sing by the therapist just as in a scene in this movie too)) and not “Your Highness” after the treatment starts (and its not Mohamat going to the mountain but vice versa) as he wants to be on equal terms with the King in the therapy sessions in his “palace”.
The treatment is as unorthodox as the therapist and it is a case of the treatment of the person through which the speech defect is cured. “Physical exercises and tricks are important, ” he says. Many of his methods are shown by a series of short shots amalgamated in one scene. This makes us get a feel of fun rather than tedium of the treatment. In the meantime, the father dies. The elder brother who gets the throne doesn’t much enjoy “Kinging”, as it is, and is infatuated with Mrs Wallis Simpson from America. And the king, as the Head of the Church of England, can not marry a divorced woman. Bertie, on the other hand “is afraid of his own shadow” as Lionel rightly assesses. After Bertie becomes the King, and a minor estrangement, Lionel assumes his job before the coronation. His job is to break down the stammer, but more than that, the fear, that generates it. He does that. The King is now not only a more vocally fluent man, but a surer man. The movie ends with the king’s speech. The speech of King George VI. What the audience care for, and are on tenterhooks, is not the occasion of the speech nor the content but the delivery. Tears again in wife’s eyes but of joy this time. Congratulations from all and one. You can call this a movie of the comedy genre. It is also a movie about friendship that can exist between men of different stations and destinies, as also about good human values, about family, and about a man assuming the responsibilities that are alien to his nature but which he must. “Let Courage Reign” seems somewhat bland as a tag line but so it works in the movie. The therapy lessons turn through intimacy and friendship towards personality development too.
Don’t look for too many historical facts. Even the portrayal of the person, the Duke who suffered ill-health, is in contrast: Firth is shown as straight, healthy and in robust health really; the way he climbs up stairs after his brother after their father’s death shows him anything but that. And then, how many of us knew all this? We remember from History, those happening times and Churchill, Hitler etc etc but not the English King. It’s art that catches that little something forsaken on the paths of time, brings it forth in a new livery and puts a shining crown on it.
Tom Hooper seems to have done a good job. The script is good too with wit carrying on the movie where it could have become dull. For the most part, the focus of the camera is on the faces of Firth and Rush. At times, the moving camera shots-- long shots many, some at waist level—give a documentary kind of feel when one can feel the state of mind of the character. Local colour is maintained but no special attention is given to it, which is good and keeps the movie on the right focus. In fact, the acting is so good you may get tempted to try stammering yourself. Don’t carry it too far, though. Firth has done a good job of showing the progressive lessening of stammer the credit for which goes to the director and the script writer (David Seidler) too. He has done well in emotional scenes showing animation, anxiety, nervousness, love, anger and also in scenes showing composure. Helena Bonham has done well too, as a confident, supportive wife. Darek Jacobi, a great actor, doesn’t get much chance to show his talent in his role as the Archbishop. Kids, Hitler, and Shakespeare have been well brought into the movie. The tone of the movie is not really effervescent but low-key, keeping a balance between the stiff-upper-lip British royalty atmosphere and the needful liveliness for a comedy. All this fills even this movie, a period drama, with life.
