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 HELEN MIRREN ...as Queen Elizabeth II |
Long live 'The Queen,'
a rich, thoughtful film
of TheColumnists.com
In “The Queen,” British movie queen Helen Mirren makes Her Majesty seem both real and regal--human, witty, feisty and historic all at once, often in a single scene, or maybe just a quick glance. This is Queen Elizabeth with much of the royal stuffing removed--still stern and starchy, to be sure, yet alive and kicking.
Even a cat can look at a queen, and director Stephen Frears gives us a totally new, only slightly catty and seemingly candid look at two tired TV subjects: the goings on at Buckingham Palace and the death of Princess Diana. “The Queen” is many movies at once--a semi-documentary, a peek behind the scenes of the monarchy, and a suspense tale: Will HRH give in to public sentiment and tabloid sensation and step down from the throne to address a teeming throng of commoners who demand not her head but her heart?
Does she even have one? In Frears’ and screenwriter Peter Morgan’s subtle, amusing, gripping, moving and incredibly incisive, finely observed film, there’s not a false, exploitive or slow moment in two hours that pass like 20 minutes. The movie is about Queen Elizabeth’s struggles with palace tradition and contemporary emotions--the “modernism” sneeringly referred to by the film’s royal advisers and embodied by Tony Blair, their only link to the guy in the street.
Blair’s own struggle to “manage” the Queen and the public simultaneously provides a close, believable look at the cogs and wheels of both the Palace and 10 Downing Street, oft warring factions forced to live together as one happy family. Diana’s death brings them both into a confrontation that a mere war or scandal never could.
Michael Sheen’s Blair is fetching and flawless (Mirren aside, the cast is unknown to Americans, this one anyway). He gives an impression of Blair that doesn’t seem like one--all ready smiles, boyish charm and flashing wit, playing the shrewd, take-charge PM, the polite Palace buffer and, in little tossed-off moments, the loving husband and father channel surfing at dinner with the family.
As the prime minister keeps insisting to the Queen, Diana’s garish death is an “exception” to all the rules that have run England for centuries. Blair ever-so-gently suggests she reconsider her decision to keep Diana’s death “a private matter” even as sobbing subjects and nagging headlines demand Her Majesty acknowledge her ex-daughter-in-law’s tragic death in a car wreck (itself blamed in part on paparazzi in hot pursuit of a Paris photo op).
There is so much to praise in the film it’s hard to know where to begin, so let’s start with the obvious: Mirren delivers a hand-tooled portrayal of Elizabeth as a cool, buttoned-up woman not out of touch with her feelings but trying to push them aside for reasons of palace protocol; as a queen trying to carry out a role she’s played all her adult life and thought she could do in her sleep; as the mother of a son riddled with complex emotions as the saddened but guilt-ridden errant ex-husband and quasi-widower; and as the loving grandmother to two young sons of a beautiful, beloved, troubled princess, now sadly dead but formerly the Palace’s in-house antagonist and turncoat.
Mirren--and Morgan’s sensitive script--balance all of these aspects of the Queen’s character as her duty conflicts with her humanity, something she’s rarely been forced to confront, let alone display publicly except on occasions of official mourning.
In the climactic scene, the Queen, for reasons both pragmatic and personal, strolls slowly amid overflowing fields of flowers and grieving cards outside the Palace, which included wounding attacks on the Royal Family (“them”), blamed by adoring Diana-ites for her demise. In the movie’s most touching scene, she’s handed flowers by a little girl who offers the bouquet to her, not--as the Queen assumes--intended for Diana.
Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth is more playful and amusing than we’re used to, getting off sly zingers to, and about, Blair and others in the Queen’s court. It’s the first time I’ve seen the famously hard-bitten actress reveal a lighter, warmer side. Mirren never plays it for easy sympathy, but somehow plays it down the middle and gets us anyway, revealing the Queen as a feeling woman trapped inside a steely, or perhaps just proper, façade. Even as she gives in to the public outcry, you wonder if it’s just pragmatic politics or real sympathy; maybe even she isn’t sure. She’s nagged into it and yet felt it needed doing.
Almost everyone in the film is as well cast as you could ask for--Alex Jennings’ Prince Charles is less rigid than the one we know, yet he speaks with the Prince’s precise cadences; James Cromwell’s Prince Phillip is pretty much the curmudgeonly coot we all know and love, tipping just slightly into caricature but Cromwell amusingly captures His Royal Fuddy-duddiness; and Roger Allam is just right as Queen Eliabeth's toady/private secretary, caught--like everyone in the film--between tradition and tabloid truth, hoping to pat down every ragged edge in the Queen’s suddenly rudely disrupted satin-lined life.
Sylvia Syms, as the Queen Mum, isn’t as sweet as her endearing legend, making her more of a tough old bird cawing nasty asides. That’s one of the film’s strengths: All of the royal characters seem at once familiar but far more layered, more human, than the cartoons and mannequins that newspapers and TV documentaries prefer to portray.
In one scene, which I found a bit hard
to believe, the Queen jumps in an SUV to go deer-stalking, only
to get stuck in a creek bed and has to call the head caretaker
on her cell phone, reminding him she used to be a mechanic (a
bizarre detail left hanging). In a poetic moment, she gazes on
a gorgeous buck with 14-point antlers, a scene you can take any
of several ways: She identifies with the animal’s regal
but lonely status? She longs to be as free as this beautiful
untamed wild beast? She just wants to get away from the craziness
at the castle for a few hours and contemplate the simplicity
of nature?).
Screenwriter Morgan is no fan of the Royal Family, and meant
his script to be highly critical of the Queen’s stubbornness
in her refusal to interrupt a hunting holiday in Scotland to
return to London to address the nation. Yet his script doesn’t
draw any easy heroes or villains. What he gives us are just real
people stuck in a sticky situation that they have to think--and,
of all things, feel--their way through without falling back on
palace tradition--or “damn precedence,” as Blair snarls,
spitting out the word with disdain.
Blair emerges as the clever hero in this high-stakes royal chess game, especially in a speech toward the end when he rips into his staff for mocking the Queen’s reluctant decision to change her mind, mingle with mourners and view the thousands of flowers strewn in the streets in tribute. Blair alone realizes how difficult a decision it was for her to make and he defends her courage in making it, whether pressured into it or not.
“The Queen” is rich in scenes like that, in which complicated values--and characters--are set in opposition and play off each other. When all is said and done, it’s really a morality play--not exactly “A Man for All Seasons,” but in that tradition--a story about what is the right thing, the human thing to do in a situation when all you have to guide you is tradition and ancient rules--often no help at all in real, raw 20th Century life.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The photo is courtesy of Miramax. This column first posted Feb. 19, 2007.
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