|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
 Best Actor Nominee COLIN FIRTH prepares to deliver a speech as England's King George VI, struggling with his speech impediment. |
The reign in pain: A true
story of a king's struggle
of TheColumnists.com
A few minutes into “The King’s Speech,” it felt a little like I was watching “My Fair Lady” in reverse.
Like the musical (and “Pygmalion,” the Shaw play it’s based upon), the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 2010 is a movie about a well-born Brit with a speech problem being cured by a commoner, whereas in the musical the commoner is turned into a lady by an upper-class vocal coach. While Colin Firth’s George VI never sings “The Rain in Spain” after he triumphs over his stuttering, he may as well have. It’s an equally joyous moment in the film, directed by Tom Cooper and insightfully written by David Seidler. For a film about an interior dilemma, it’s lovely to look at it as well, and has the integrity of “The Queen.”
Movies about people overcoming physical
obstacles have become a major cinematic genre, indeed a cliché,
but “The King’s Speech” may be the first feature
film ever made about stuttering, one of the more common human
afflictions. Until now, the major movie stutterer was Porky Pig
(“Th-th-that’s all, folks!”), stammering’s
comic patron saint. "The only other major historical stutterer
on screen who comes to mind is Derek Jacobi in PBS's "I,
Claudius."
I suffered from a moderate case all the way through high school,
going to speech teachers every week to unsnarl my twisted tongue,
but I was never nearly as constricted as the movie shows the
future king of England, who almost strangles on his own words
as he struggles to speak. His case is more severe than most,
but even so he is an unwilling and skeptical patient, as angry
and impatient at attempts to smooth out his speech impediment
as he is with the problem itself. Firth makes you feel the king’s
psychic as well as physical agony.
Anyone with even a mild stutter will recognize the painful symptoms
of trying to wrench lips, tongue and larynx free to pronounce
various balky consonants that tie you in terrible and embarrassing
knots - letters like k, l, m, p, t and g. My own scary enemy
was “w,” which requires pursing the lips to form the
right sound; now and then I still stumble over “w”
words.
Stuttering (or “stammering,” usually regarded as less serious -- like Bob Newhart’s character on “Newhart”) is different from most other physical afflictions. Not only are you unable to utter the words you want, you’re a kind of nuisance, blocking normal communication between yourself and others because you can’t get the damn words out.
The more patient people are, waiting for you to say what you want, the worse it gets: the pressure mounts and you sense people shifting uneasily, which blocks you even further. When well-intentioned people try to finish a sentence for you, or tell you to take it easy and relax, you’re humiliated even more. Stuttering is almost a social disease.
For decades, stuttering baffled (and still does) speech therapists, some of them quacks, which the movie portrays in scenes of the would-be king with marbles in his mouth (the fabled exercise that allegedly cured Demosthenes), which he spits out in a fury. In another scene, we see him rolling around on the floor to somehow loosen his body--and, presumably, his vocal cords and diaphragm. While I never rolled around on the living room carpet or chewed marbles, I endured all sorts of boring breathing and vocal exercises, none of which seemed to have the slightest positive effect.
I finally struggled free of my vocal demons
when I began writing in college, and had some success--make of
it what you will. Did I need to find my “voice” in
print first? Mainly, I suspect, it was that the act of writing--and
being read--that gave me some much-needed confidence, the key
to unlocking all kinds of psychological handcuffs.
“The King’s Speech,” apart from being a superbly
made film (if historically inaccurate in many ways, according
to a history buff friend), is a pretty honest account of what
stutterers must endure just to get through the day--or a casual
conversation, let alone speaking to throngs over the radio, as
the king must learn to do--and of course finally does, in a moving
final scene (if maybe a tad too miraculously).
Even if there are historical liberties
taken in “The King’s Speech,” it’s a kind
of documentary on the nature of stuttering. As the film reveals,
stutterers usually can sing and curse and recite dramatic lines
from a play without missing a beat, but put them before a crowd,
or a microphone, or even a telephone, and they’re unhinged.
The slightest social setting can constrict a stutterer. The movie
also suggests that having a dominant, or domineering father,
like this king’s, can tie a child into vocal knots.
The film, though, is only secondarily about stuttering It’s
really about the relationship between the king-to-be and his
insistent speech teacher, Lionel Logue, persuasively played by
Geoffrey Rush, even though they were never close friends in real
life as the film depicts, with the two calling each other Lionel
and “Bertie,” the king’s nickname.
The movie has the king arriving for therapy with his wife (Helena Bonham-Carter) under the name of “Johnson,” to disguise his identity--perhaps, perhaps not. In any case, it’s a clever dramatic device. You also have to question whether the real vocal teacher berated, even bullied, the soon-to-be king as Logue does his regal patient in the movie. Logue overrules his royal subject in their very first meeting, justifying his methodology by proclaiming, “My castle, my rules.”
It was really the invention of radio that caused the trauma that George VI had to overcome to become a real monarch after his playboy brother, the Duke of Windsor, abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced woman (portrayed, as usual, as a snooty gold-digging tramp). Before “the wireless,” kings and queens simply could issue proclamations and deliver speeches on paper, without the need to be heard addressing the multitudes. It was radio that forced royalty to speak. As King George cries, “We’ve become actors!” If Henry VIII or Queen Victoria stuttered, nobody will ever know.
©2011 by Gerald Nachman. The photo from "The King's Speech" is courtesy of The Weinstein Company. The terms "Oscar" and "Academy Awards" are used courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. This column first posted Feb. 21, 2011.
You
can comment on this column online via our TALKBACK page. Please address your message to
either "The Editors" or Gerald Nachman at Syndpack@aol.com