The King's Speech

This may come off as a rather curious notion, considering our long proud history as a Republic:  America needs a monarchy.  I know King George III left a pretty bad taste in our mouth, though its not our position towards taxation was particularly reasonable.  The issue in our Revolution was not particularly that monarchies don't work, but that our nation was too vast and ambitious to be ruled by a small island two thousand miles away.  Clearly American cannot be ruled from an English monarchy, but why not an American one?  There's a certain romance and continuous ancient power related to the concept of a sovereign, something that our constantly shifting political tides cannot possibly meet.  And yeah, I know America is based upon the idea that everybody can reach any position of power no matter what their birth, and monarchies are essentially the exact opposite of that concept.  However, nobody said that the monarchy had to be hereditary - there do exist elected monarchies*.  Think of the Pope.

There's a magic to the Presidential family, but its all too brief and ultimately divisive.  Half our country feels that Obama does not speak for them, and the other half thought that Bush didn't represent them two years ago.  A apolitical and ultimately powerless symbol of national unity such a monarch is exactly the figure this country needs to create continuity.  Kings or Queens are like living flags or anthems, they exist purely as decorations that establish a common culture for this nation.  The liberals and conservatives need at least one living person they can both equally respect.  The Founding Fathers already serve as a sort of human symbol, but they're far too mailable as rhetorical devises.  Its too easy to put your own ideas into the mouths of Washington and Jefferson, it would be far more difficult to do the same to Queen Elizabeth.  More importantly, Kings and Queens are things that people love about their governments - we like having a figure with Divine Right standing above us.  Maybe if Timothy McVeigh had a Queen to love he wouldn't have been so willing to assume that his government wanted to destroy him.  At least I love the idea of monarchy - "The Lion King" probably has something to do with that.

I only bring this up now because I recently saw the excellent movie, "The King's Speech", and its made me go ga-ga over monarchies.  In that way, its a wonderfully successful film.

"The King's Speech" retells a true events surrounding the now largely ignored reign of King George VI, the father of the current Queen.  Aside from a bit of time dilation and artistic liberties, what happens in this movie is true.  Of course, the history is pretty questionable, as always.

The reign of King George V is coming to a close while the long haunting shadow of Hitler and Stalin hang dark over Britian's future.  Prince "Bertie" Albert (Colin Firth), the second son and second in line from the throne, simply wishes to be a happy father and secondary member of the nobility.  However, his older brother, David, the future King Edward VIII (played by Guy Pierce), is a fool completely whipped by his adulterous American lover, Wallis Simpson.  Bertie is now faced with the prospect of becoming king in his own right but he too has a flaw:  he stutters.  In a new modern age where the king is forced to speak publicly on the new inventions of wireless radio, Bertie's stutter is a horrific disability.  For help, he sees Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian** failed actor turned self-taught speech therapist who helps Bertie overcome his stammer.

There's a certain simple, even fairy tale brilliance about the plot to "The King's Speech".  The central dilemma, the stammer, is a pretty good metaphor for Bertie's fear upon ascending to the throne.  Being psychological in nature, it naturally reveals the cruel nature of George V as a father, for example insisting that Bertie write with the wrong hand.  David, a wanna-be playboy filled with character faults brings back years of abuse by simply reusing a childhood tease:  "B-b-b-b-Bertie".  The King's impediment forces him to look to help from a commoner, the first commoner whom he truly gets to know in any way.  Indeed Logue is said to be the King's first friend, aside from his loving wife, played by Helena Bonham Carter.  The crisis of overcoming his stammer while making very key and important speeches to his public on the eve of WWII is the central source of tension and drama to the film.  Its the title speech, a short three-minute radio address that is the climax of the film.

Lionel Logue insists upon an alien form of informality to his patient, insisting that he use then Duke's childhood nickname "Bertie", rather than any formal title.  Rush's Logue is both subversive (openly mocking St. Edward's Chair and royal privilege at times) but also has a sort of sage-like wisdom to him.  "My castle, my rules", is his demand.  Easily he is the film's funniest character.  Geoffrey Rush's face certainly has gotten interesting with all its sags and folds through aging, and just following the contours of it is entertaining enough.  Logue also attempts, with little success to play the lead role of "Richard III", due to his accent, revealing British snobbery of the time.  Of course, this is nonsense, because Geoffrey Rush would totally kill the part of Richard III, and I would pay hundreds of dollars to see that performance - Australian accent or not.  Most importantly for the film's themes, Logue only gives up the pretext of equality once Bertie has accepted him as a friend - a kind of small Consent of the Governed.

I must mention that the real Lionel Logue was considerably more handsome than Geoffrey Rush, in what is probably the only case of Hollywood making their subject less attractive.

As for Bertie, he is a quiet man, with as much love for the family he has created as fear of the family he was born into.  He describes it with "this isn't a family, its an enterprise".  Bertie is a man full of fear who has to be coaxed up by Logue to admit his destiny on the Throne.  However, we never truly pity him, as Colin Firth fills the character not only with sadness but warmth for his two girls and a fiery temper.  Yet he is unable to react when his girls address him with a formal bow and "Your Majesty".  In the end though, he finds his own place, or Voice to follow the film's metaphor, as King.

One of the things I really liked about "The King's Speech" is how its basically an unofficial prequel to the 2006 drama "The Queen" starring Helen Mirren.  They both share very similar themes of humanizing the Royal Family while at the same time romanticizing them as a the necessary keystone that holds up the arch of British culture.  The old style of simple Divine Right Majesty appears briefly in George V, played by none other than Dumbledore from the "Harry Potter" films,   Queen Elizabeth appears in this film as a little girl, the Queen Mother is the current Queen and only in her thirties, and importantly the ghost of George VI lies over the plot of "The Queen".  The two films almost serve as bookends to each other as well:  "The King's Speech" details the emotional turmoil in rising up to become king, while "The Queen" instead details the turmoil that comes at the twilight of a long reign.  They'd make a good back-to-back filming.  I'm hoping in thirty years to see a film about King Charles III - assuming he ever actually gets the Throne - so that this can be a trilogy.

The imagery of "The King's Speech" is a sort of strange mixture between Dickensian squalor with a few nearly anachronistic objects of modernity.  Cars drive by, dodging horse and buggies and orphan children in the grey smog of London. Logue's own office is spacious yet filled with crumbling walls and dust.  In fact, so much of this movie's concept of 1930s London is so drab and unpleasant that I have to wonder what all that greyness is doing in this film.  Isn't Britian something worth protecting?  Notably George VI was the last monarch in the Age of Colonialism:  he was the one who saw the Jewel in the Crown disappear, and the destruction of his overseas Empire.  Yet he still represented Britain at a time in history that we today look back upon as the finest hour of that nation.

However, the man most associated with Britain during WWII is not George VI, but Winston Churchill.  It was not the speech presented here that resonated through history as a symbol of Britain's defiance to the evil of Hitler's Germany, but rather Churchill's.  He was the one who actually called the Second World War Britain's "finest hour".  Who said "We will never surrender"?  Churchill, not George VI, who was hardly as Anti-Nazi as this film portrays him to be.  Nobody can deny Churchill's place in history, which is why he appears in this film, as kind of a forced added extra into scenes that the real Churchill was actually absent for.  Of course, Churchill is today celebrated as the Greatest Briton in History, while George VI is little thought of, which is why this movie exists in the first place.

"The King's Speech" is easily one of the best films of 2010, as I've said before.  But one has to repeat oneself for a conclusion, so I'm repeating myself now.  Its destined for an Academy Award Best Picture nomination, and I daresay I would not be disappointed if it won.  I had high hopes for this one, and I was not disappointed.  As the last 2010 film I'm going to see in theatres, I gotta say, this ended the year quite well.

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* Unfortunately elected monarchies do a have a nasty tendencies to turn into hereditary ones after so many centuries.

** I hate to admit this, but it was actually a half hour after meeting Lionel Logue that I figured out that he was supposed to be Australian.  My ears aren't trained for the difference between English and Australian accents - it had to be spelled out to me for to get it.  Oh well, I'm not perfect.