→ November 28, 2011
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The Fighter.

I finally got around to watching The Fighter (on sale for $9.49 through that link) on Friday night – an odd experience seeing Amy Adams as a New England townie a few hours after I saw her in The Muppets – which makes it the ninth and final 2010 Best Picture nominee for me to watch. (I’m not watching 127 Hours, because I can’t stand James Franco, and that movie is basically him.) A few of you loved it, and a few of you said it was a decent movie with great performances; I’d put myself squarely in the latter camp.

Based very loosely on the story of Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a boxer from Lowell who made a somewhat improbable comeback in his 30s after a hiatus from the sport, becoming the WBU light welterweight champion, at which point the film ends. (I know zilch about boxing, as you probably guessed.) Ward’s brother and part-time trainer, Dick Eklund (Christian Bale), was also a professional boxer whose career ended due to cocaine addiction and ended up in jail for armed robbery. The film melodramatizes their relationship, moving around several events in the timeline to heighten the tension, while also folding in their crazy mother, played by Melissa Leo, and Ward’s girlfriend Charlene (Adams), who provides him with some stability and common sense. In an inspired move by the directors, Ward’s other trainer, Mickey O’Keefe, is played by … Mickey O’Keefe himself, well enough that it never occurred to me that he wasn’t a professional actor.

The film itself is a tight but rather generic underdog sports film, where Ward gets beaten down in the ring and out of it, quitting boxing and eventually having his hand broken in a fight with police where he’s defending his idiot brother (which I don’t think ever actually happened). With Dick in jail, Micky throws off the deadweight of him and his mother, rededicates himself to training, and ends up winning several fights, one of which comes after some advice from a still-imprisoned Dick. The curve of the narrative is so smooth that I felt like I was being played.

But the performances are really out of sight. Bale and Leo won Oscars for Best Supporting Actor and Actress; Bale’s was a pretty easy call, but I thought Leo largely won because of her accent and look, with Adams delivering an equally strong but more nuanced performance. There’s a great scene where she and Micky are about to have a little afternoon delight – with a shot of her in black lingerie that is absolutely there because, hey, Amy Adams in black lingerie sounds great – that culminates with Adams beating the crap out of one of Micky’s twenty-nine sisters on the porch of the house where she lives; Charlene is tough, independent (which grates on Micky’s family), but guarded, and doesn’t have the same over-the-top I’m-so-wicked-local veneer as Leo’s portrayal of Alice as a scheming, white-trashy woman who sees Micky as a paycheck and Dick as a misunderstood kid, not as an addict, thief, and anchor on his brother. Wahlberg plays the title role but is so understated next to the manic Bale that he’s overshadowed, but a similarly ebullient character would have made the film unwatchable (never mind whether it would have been realistic).

Again, I don’t follow boxing or even remotely like the sport, but one thing I noticed was that the boxing scenes looked somewhat realistic – the punches looked like they were landing, as opposed to the standard “wow, he really made contact with that pocket of air” technique. I’m sure some of the boxing scenes were glamorized, and real fans of the sweet science could probably pick them apart (please do – I’m curious), but at least the makers of the film made an effort to make the fight scenes watchable to the non-fan.

And, because everyone loves a ranking, here are the Best Picture nominees from 2011, in one non-critic’s opinion, with links to my reviews of seven of them.

1. Winter’s Bone
2. The King’s Speech
3. The Social Network
4. Toy Story 3
5. True Grit
6. Inception
7. The Fighter
8. Black Swan
9. The Kids Are All Right
10. Sorry, I’m just not watching it.

Of course, those aren’t the best films of 2010, but it seemed like a good enough place to start. I have heard raves about Animal Kingdom, so that’s in the queue.

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→ September 29, 2011
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The Kids Are All Right.

The more I think about The Kids Are All Right (currently $6.59 on amazon), a 2010 comedy nominated for Best Picture with every other movie made in Hollywood last year, the more frustrating I find it. It is extremely well-acted, with as many as five strong performances depending on your standards for younger actors, and deliberately uncomfortable almost from the first line of dialogue. Its exploration of the nature of complex long-term relationships by using one we might (wrongly) consider “unusual” and making it look as usual as it should be is insightful and unflinching. And then the whole thing falls flat in the final ten minutes, as if the writers just ran out of steam – or were encouraged to deliver a more traditional ending.

Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) Allgood are a married lesbian couple who have raised two children, 18-year-old Joni and 15-year-old (I think) Laser, each borne by a different mother but from sperm from the same anonymous donor. Laser pushes Joni to call the sperm bank and request to contact the donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a modern-hippie restaurateur who becomes involved in the kids’ lives, much to the chagrin of Nic. Jules, meanwhile, is trying to get a landscape design business for which she seems fairly unqualified off the ground, and agrees to take on Paul as her first client, only to – mild spoiler here – end up sleeping with him. (The scene where they first have sex includes a hilarious nod to the scene in Boogie Nights where Moore’s character first sees Dirk Diggler’s jiggler.) The consequences of that act, while fairly predictable, aren’t fully played out at the end of the film, particularly not for Paul, whose storyline was cut off without a fraction of resolution, a shame for a character that was both central and well-developed, flawed yet sympathetic, often the lens through which we see the Allgoods more clearly.

At first blush, I took the film to be a meditation on the nature of families and how delicate the balance can be even in what otherwise appears to be an emotionally strong family; the fact that the parents are gay is only relevant in that it allows for the sperm-donor plot line, as otherwise the Allgoods are a standard nuclear family. But now I’m wondering if the film is really about Nic, and how destructive her own controlling personality is on her family, especially on Jules and Laser. She crosses the line into overinvolvement in some of her interrogations of her kids (and the third degree she later gives Paul). She uses Jules’ and Paul’s affair as a weapon to drive wedges between Jules and the kids as well as between Paul and the kids, and to reestablish her dominance in her relationship with Jules. In the dinner scene at Paul’s house, she brings the entire conversation to a halt with a seemingly innocent move that is designed to get all eyes on her. Even before the final blowout with Jules, their arguments revolve around her dissatisfaction – and if Jules tries to get a word in about her own complaints, Nic manages to refocus the argument about herself. She might be a narcissist, but even if not she clearly has a driving need to control everything she can in her life, even if that means detracting from the lives of those closest to her.

Bening is off the charts in her performance as Nic – what a year for actresses in starring roles – infusing nearly every scene, even light ones, with the tension that defines her tightly-wound character. Moore was also excellent in her typical up-for-anything role, but I thought Bening’s task was tougher, as Nic is written with strong masculine and feminine sides; she’s the head of household, breadwinner, decision-maker, with boyishly short hair, yet wears makeup (Jules doesn’t), shows more outward emotion, takes more care of her overall appearance … perhaps the character is just overwhelmed by the extent of the role she expects or is expected to fill, and just when she has the balance right, in comes Paul to upset everything. This conflict makes it all the more unsatisfying when the storyline ends so abruptly. A clean, complete resolution would be unrealistic, but there’s an “everything’s going to be fine” vibe to the closing scenes that I didn’t think was set up by anything that came before it.

Ruffalo was affecting in an understated role as the soft-spoken, warm-hearted Paul, living a twenty-year-old’s dream life only to realize through his discovery of an instant family that he doesn’t have the life he really wants. The script easily could have left him as simply a vehicle to expose the fragile structure holding the Allgood family together, but instead he was a fully-formed character who establishes different relationships with each of the four family members. Laser ended up with the least development – although he has one of the better lines when his mothers catch him and a friend watching an adult DVD, a scene that is about as awkward (in a good way) as any realistic movie can get – and his relationship with Paul is also underexplored, especially since he was the one who originally pushed his sister to call the sperm bank.

I can watch and appreciate a tough, complex, uncomfortable movie if there’s a decent payoff at the end – again, not necessarily a clear dénouement wrapped up in a bow, but one where the protagonists are, if not better off, at least materially changed because of the conclusion of the episode they’ve just experienced. The Kids Are All Right does so many things well, but the characters end their story under an illusion that nothing at all has changed. Maybe that’s the point, but for me, it took away from much of the reward of watching the first 90 minutes.

Apropos of nothing, the title of this film has put the Supergrass song “Alright” in my head for the last week.

Next up: The 2011 remake of Jane Eyre, starring Mia Wasikowska, who played Joni in this movie, as the title character.

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→ September 16, 2011
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Black Swan.

Black Swan is an extremely well-acted psychological thriller about a tightly-wound ballet dancer who may or may not be losing her mind as a result of the stress of her job (and, perhaps, malnutrition from her bulimia). It’s also thinly plotted and hard to watch because of (I assume deliberately) shaky cinematography and dim lighting.

A New York ballet company is putting on a production of Swan Lake just as its longtime star, now 35, is being forced out of her role due to age. Nina, a shy but very talented technical ballerina, wins the central part playing both the White and Black Swans in the show, but finds herself beset by doubts, hounded by impossible visions, and threatened by a new dancer just in from San Francisco who may or may not be trying to steal her role.

The movie rests heavily on the depth of its four main characters and the performances given by those actors. Natalie Portman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her central role as Nina, a fragile, childlike ballerina who is perfect for the White Swan role but is so obsessed with perfection that she can’t provide the passionate, reckless dancing required for a convincing seductress Black Swan. Portman, like Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, has to be on pointe throughout the film to pull it off, as her character is in every scene and she must be credible as an adult whose emotional and physical growth has been stunted. I was put off by her wispy voicing of almost every line through the first hour and a half, although it did help cement her nervous, timid personality.

Mila Kunis probably earned more notoriety for her sex scene with Portman than she did for her work in the rest of the film, but whose work as a free-spirited, gregarious colleague who must create suspicion in the viewer’s mind about her ultimate motives was as essential to the film’s credibility as Portman’s work. Vincent Cassel, whom I’d only seen before in Eastern Promises, is outstanding as Thomas, the creepy-but-not-always-creepy director of the ballet company, a man who is probably abusing his position and yet gives no doubt that he is committed to coaxing a command performance from his star. Barbara Hershey, playing Nina’s mother, alternates between a vindictive Mommie Dearest and a loving if overprotective mother who is desperate to prevent ballet from ruining her daughter’s life while living vicariously through her daughter’s success.

But how much of what we see is real, and how much is filtered through the distorted lenses of Nina’s hallucinations? Much of what we see in the film is clearly faulty wiring in her head, including a scene where she peels a thick layer of skin off her finger, or another where her legs spontaneously break in absurd directions. But those obvious illusions could be tipping us off that much of what seems real isn’t, something backed up by frequent decisions to use a vantage point directly behind Nina’s head. Is her mother actually the witch we see in half of her scenes, or is that Nina’s perception of her? How much of Lily’s two-faced personality is, again, Nina’s jealousy manifesting itself in imagined or distorted conversations that are shown to us through her mind? I don’t think there’s a correct answer on this one, but after thinking about the movie for the last 36 hours, I’m inclined to believe that she is the film’s unreliable narrator, and virtually none of what we see before the final scene can be taken at face value.

The story itself contains enough small twists and turns to maintain a moderate level of tension, even though it should be clear from the start where we must finish, since Thomas explains the plot of Swan Lake and the script doesn’t hide the parallels between the film and the ballet within it. But the decision to shoot so many scenes from behind Portman on some kind of handheld camera made for very rough, shaky cinematography – again, possibly a conscious decision to reflect the turmoil inside of Nina’s head, but hell to watch at long stretches. That’s exacerbated by the fact that the lighting in just about every scene in the film is poor and everything is dank and gray, good for keeping the mood bleak but, again, tough to watch for a hundred minutes.

My wife danced for about seven years as a child at a local ballet school, so I defer to her on questions about the dancing in the film. Her gut impression was that we were seeing much more of Portman’s dancing double, Sarah Lane, than we were of Portman, saying the key was to watch the character’s feet – a non-professional dancer couldn’t point her toes or arch her foot half as well as someone who’s been dancing for a decade, because of muscle and bone development. She assumed that any time Nina’s feet were out of the shot or her face wasn’t visible – we had a lot of scenes where her face was blocked by another character or only visible in a blurry reflection in a mirror – that it was her double.

To answer two questions I’m anticipating from the regular readers among you:

* I’m torn on Best Actress between Portman and Lawrence. Both roles were difficult. Both women executed them about as well as I could expect. I think Lawrence’s was more difficult, but feel like I’m unqualified to make that judgment when it’s such a close call; it seems to me like playing a child who acts convincingly like an adult would be harder than playing an adult who acts convincingly like a child. I know Lawrence was more critical to Winter’s Bone than Portman was to Black Swan, but is that not analogous to judging an MVP candidate by the caliber of his teammates? I still lean Lawrence, but without confidence that she’s the right call over Portman.

* Best Picture: I’m through seven, and this would be at the bottom of the seven for me. Good movie, but not on par with the previous six I’ve seen. I think The Kids Are All Right is on its way to us from Netflix.

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→ September 10, 2011
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Winter’s Bone.

Winter’s Bone was one of the eight hundred, or more accurately ten, nominees for Best Picture in this year’s Academy Awards, and of the six I’ve seen it was pretty clearly the best movie. It wasn’t the most enjoyable, and I’m not sure I’d be all that eager to watch it again, but for plot, dialogue, direction, visuals, and key performances, this one edges out The King’s Speech.

Set in a backwoods community somewhere in the Missouri Ozarks, Winter’s Bone focus on Ree (played by Jennifer Lawrence), a 17-year-old girl who is her family’s de facto parent. Her mother is catatonic, and her father, a meth addict and meth maker as well, is out of the picture, leaving Ree in charge of her much younger brother and sister. Ree is barely holding things together with a little help from neighbors when she’s told that her father put up their rickety house and property as bond for his most recent court date and has now disappeared. She has just a few days to locate him or face losing the house.

The search for Ree’s father isn’t the main narrative element in the movie; the court date passes and the narrative splinters into an effort to prove he’s dead (if he is, which Ree doesn’t know for sure) and a few desperate plot strands related to it. The central story is the reactions of Ree’s neighbors, all relatives of hers, some distant, some as close as her father’s brother Teardrop (John Hawkes), but most of whom stonewall her in her attempts to locate her father. She’s turned away, bought off, threatened, and eventually beaten to try to get her to stop looking.

You could argue Winter’s Bone is about one of two things. One interpretation a few of you offered on Twitter was that the film (based on a novel of the same name) is about finding slivers of humanity in a situation that bears neither physical nor emotional resemblance to anything most people seeing this film would recognize as modern life. Ree’s people are all broken to various degrees; even Teardrop, who shows the most kindness towards Ree over the course of the movie, is a drug addict who tells his wife “I said shut up once already, with my mouth.” No one seems truly good except Ree and her friend Gail (played by Lauren Sweetser, who appears to be one of the many locals cast in various roles in the film, which was shot entirely on location), and even Ree is pushed to the boundaries of her goodness.

I saw the movie much more as a character study of Ree, one that could only succeed if the writing was strong enough and the performance of the actress matched it. Ree’s love for her siblings pushes her forward into uncomfortable and even dangerous situations; the threat of violence doesn’t deter her, and ultimately the evident strength of her resolve forces her antagonists to change their tactics in dealing with her. Nothing shakes her; her dedication to her task on behalf of her siblings is absolute, much like the Man shows for his son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And she’s a child who has been prematurely aged emotionally by the horrific circumstances of her home life, let down explicitly by her father and implicitly by her mother (who had a breakdown related to Ree’s father).

Had Jennifer Lawrence been anything less than perfect in her role as Ree, Winter’s Bone would not have succeeded. Her character is so central to the movie that the actress’ credibility as a child who acts in almost every way like an adult is critical, and Lawrence nailed it. She looks young, and of course is dressed to look young, yet projects adult determination and toughness in confrontation after confrontation with the irrational, unfeeling, often intimidating adults who are standing between her and a possible solution to this looming catastrophe. I found her utterly convincing in look, in tone, in timing, and in conveying this very faint hint of vulnerability, or maybe fear – not fear for herself, but fear that she’ll fail. I haven’t seen Black Swan yet, but either Natalie Portman gave a historic performance, or Oscar voters are every bit as subject to the narrative as baseball writers are.

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→ August 31, 2011
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The Social Network.

The Social Network, a stylized, maybe not all that accurate rendition of Facebook’s origin story, won wide acclaim in last year’s awards season before running into The King’s Speech at the Oscars. Featuring a ferociously quick, smart screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher (apparently a favorite director of many of my readers), it takes what might otherwise be dry source material and draws you into a technical and legal morass by means of a truly well-told story, one full of flawed characters, interpersonal drama, and plenty of incredibly funny lines.

Although nearly all of the central characters in The Social Network are real, as are the major plot points, much of what fills in the rest of the plot was either exaggerated or just made up to make for a more compelling script. (Since it’s not pitched as a documentary, I don’t have a huge issue with this.) In the film, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg is shown as a brilliant programmer, business visionary, and interpersonal doofus who is set on the path to start Facebook after he’s dumped (with cause) by a girlfriend after an insane conversation that more or less concludes when he tells her she doesn’t really have to study because “you go to BU.” After that point, the film uses two parallel lawsuits against Zuckerberg to structure the narrative through long flashbacks that follow the history of Facebook from its predecessor, facemash (a hot-or-not type of site featuring only coeds at Harvard), through his interaction with the Winklevoss twins (who may or may not have given him the idea for Facebook), to the startup phase of Facebook and eventually to the move to Silicon Valley and venture capital investments that led to a schism between Zuckerberg and his best friend, CFO, and seed-money source Eduardo Saverin.

The pace and intelligence of the dialogue in The Social Network are frenetic, reliant on actors who can deliver the lines credibly and time everything properly. It reminded me not of any drama or anything recent, but of one of my favorite classic films, the screwball comedy His Girl Friday, a Cary Grant vehicle known for so much dialogue that its script had three times the pages per minute of a typical script of the era. The Social Network isn’t quite that frenzied – characters aren’t talking over each other as Grant and costar Rosalind Russell did – but just about every character speaks quickly, and there’s no mercy with the dialogue, not in vocabulary, in subject matter, or in pauses between scenes. This isn’t merely a movie about really smart people – it’s a really smart movie about really smart people, and it expects you to follow along.

Eisenberg earned plaudits and award nominations for his performance as Mark Zuckerberg, affecting disdain for most of the people around him and perhaps for social connections in toto, yet switching to fanboy mode when Internet rock star/bad boy Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) shows up and talks his way into the company. Timberlake was just as good as Eisenberg in less screen time, playing Parker as more pretense than substance, untrustworthy but never grating. And Andrew Garfield, who’s about to become a huge star as Peter Parker in the next unnecessary Spiderman reboot, was incredibly affecting as Eduardo Saverin, who, in the movie at least, is squeezed out by Zuckerberg and Parker in the latter’s power play. (Saverin was the primary inside source for Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, which was in turn the source for Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network. I haven’t tackled that book, but one of Mezrich’s earlier books, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, was a great read.)

I did enjoy the Harvard scenery and even some campus vernacular. The final clubs’ role in campus life may have been overstated; my sense at the time I was there was that they were very much on the fringes of the social scene, although to be fair I was never “punched” and so I don’t have first person experience to back that impression up. I did notice that Zuckerberg’s dorm room was a good bit larger than any room I ever had at Harvard, and less industrial-looking.

I’ve read some criticism of The Social Network for its portrayal of “nerds” as socially awkward or simply awful people, but I didn’t see that in the film at all. No one comes off worse than the Winklevoss twins, who appear as entitled upper class twits and are, in the script, probably the least intelligent of the central characters. Zuckerberg may be socially inept, but he also ends up getting stinking rich because of his intelligence and work ethic, and I think the portrayal of him as able to outsmart would-be competitors and to work wonders with a modest amount of coding both paint him in a better light than otherwise reported. He’s not depicted as a great guy, but the film’s central debate on his character – it’s bookended by women telling him he’s an asshole (beginning) or that he’s just trying to be one (end) – only covers half of what makes him compelling as the protagonist.

In a rather scathing review of the film’s underlying message, Harvard Law professor Laurence Lessig argued that the script ignores the fact that the Winklevoss’ suit, one of two central plot points, was basically frivolous. The film never mentions an NDA or non-compete agreement, and Zuckerberg says explicitly that he took no code from the Winklevoss’ efforts. So what exactly were the grounds for their suit? You can’t copyright an idea, and you aren’t supposed to be able to patent one (although there are these bogus “business method” patents, the film never mentions that either). Zuckerberg isn’t accused of stealing a trade secret. He settled simply to make the nuisance suit go away. Lessig argues that this is a pox on our economy, and I tend to agree. He also argues that the film omitted the power of the Internet to destroy barriers to entry into new or existing market spaces, which is undoubtedly true but tangential to the human story (real, fabricated, or somewhere in between) at the heart of The Social Network.

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→ August 6, 2011
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True Grit

The 2010 version of True Grit (iTunes versionicon) earned ten Academy Award nominations – winning none, so I hope it truly is an honor just to be nominated, otherwise the Coen brothers must be really pissed off – which accurately reflects the quality of the acting, the screenplay, and the visuals. It’s also an unusually mainstream film for the Coens, who seem to specialize in cult favorites or films that garner more acclaim from critics than at the box office. I enjoyed the film more for its critical aspects than for the story, and would rank it as above-average but have a hard time pushing myself to call it plus.

Mattie Ross is a 14-year-old girl whose father was robbed and murdered by a hired hand named Tom Chaney, who subsequently fled into the Indian Territories (now constituting the bulk of Oklahoma) to escape arrest. Mattie, ostensibly in a frontier town to collect her father’s body and belongings, hires the dissolute bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn – over his objections – to catch Chaney, with the condition that she accompany him on the chase. They are joined by the arrogant Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, himself pursuing Chaney for the murder of a state senator and a dog in Texas. (It is unclear which was the greater transgression.)

The Coen brothers were, as far as I can tell having not read the novel, faithful to the original work, or at least far more so than the 1969 adaptation for which John Wayne won an Academy Award. (I haven’t seen that film either.) That decision appears double-edged to me, for while it means they stuck to Mattie’s perspective and gave her character a richness it might have otherwise lacked, it also leads down the figurative and literal slope of coincidences and sentiment in the film’s final fifteen minutes. Everything is a little too clean and perfect. You knew that a snake would come into play. You knew someone would fall into the hole in the ground. The Coen brothers didn’t have to kill off a main character to make the film a little grittier, pun intended, but it seems that their loyalty to Portis’ original work won out.

Two aspects of the film stood out over all others. One, obviously, is Hailee Steinfeld, who portrays Mattie and was just 12 years old when True Grit was filmed. Her performance was absolutely critical to the movie’s success – she needs to be tough, firm, adult-like in sensibility yet still maintaining the naïveté of a child of her age; if she’s not believable, nothing that comes after in the film would matter. She must be able to boss around the grizzled, alcoholic Cogburn (played by Jeff Bridges) and yet to be vulnerable when she’s first exposed to violence or finds herself disdained (or worse) by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). And she owns the screen in her negotiation with the dismissive horse-trader that ends with her talking him into a corner and out of his money, a scene where you would easily forget Steinfeld’s age were you not reminded of it within the dialogue. That she accomplished this at her age in her first significant film role is remarkable and justifies the passel of awards she won for her work, as well as the nomination for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (an award won by Melissa Leo for The Fighter).

The other aspect that stood out is the cinematography, which is not something I ordinarily notice in films unless it’s done poorly. But the Coen brothers played True Grit as a classic Western epic, filling the screen with wide-angle views of the countryside, using plot elements like having Mattie on top of a cliff while a battle rages below as an excuse for Roger Deakins to give us an expansive shot of the dusty plateau where the climactic encounter of the book occurs.

(I admit I would have loved to have seen an outtake featuring Rooster Cogburn ordering a White Russian, but maybe that’s just me.)

As for the Best Picture race of last year, I’d still give The King’s Speech the nod over True Grit; both were well-acted, but the two lead performances in The King’s Speech were better than any of the three major performances here. Both films benefited from some contrived drama – the former by altering historical circumstances, the latter through a little coincidence and some silly foreshadowing – but The King’s Speech did so more subtly.

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→ July 29, 2011
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The King’s Speech.

Lots of baseball content the last few days, including breakdowns of the Colby Rasmus trade, the Carlos Beltran trade, and the Kosuke Fukudome trade, plus my regular Klawchat yesterday.

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I can’t say if The King’s Speech was truly the best picture of 2010, although it was honored with the Academy Award of that name, since I haven’t seen the other contenders. It is, however, a completely worthy recipient of the honor, one of the best-acted films I have ever seen, with a screenplay that takes some fairly dry subject matter and turns it into a rousing, emotional film even though the audience already knows how the film must end.

The King’s Speech dramatizes the relationship between the stammering Prince Albert, Duke of York, later King George VI, and an Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who used unconventional methods to help the Prince overcome both the stammer and his resultant fear of public speaking. The Prince avoids most public speaking duties until, in the movie at least, he is forced to surmount this obstacle when his brother Edward, Duke of Wales, abdicates the throne to marry an American divorcée. While not quite historically accurate in its chronology or its portrayals of certain secondary characters, the film avoids the less forgivable sins of lionizing (or demonizing) its central characters or crafting an excessively sentimental narrative.

Colin Firth, as the titular King, and Geoffrey Rush, as Logue, both deliver command performances. Firth won the Oscar for Best Actor with a tense portrayal that conveys a constant sense of anxiety whenever he’s asked to speak in any kind of difficult situation, often evoking that dread through slight changes in his facial expression or a sudden explosion of temper (where the rage is merely a cover for an inner fear). But while Rush was challenged less by his role, his performance seemed totally effortless, exuding a calm confidence when his character is at work that proves superficial in the handful of scenes when he’s outside that sphere. (Rush won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1996 for another brilliant performance as a musical prodigy who suffers a breakdown due to schizoaffective disorder in the marvelous film Shine.)

No other character receives close to the screen time of the two leads, although there’s talent in abundance. Derek Jacobi is somewhat wasted as the sycophantic Archbishop of Canterbury, while Helena Bonham Carter provides a cornucopia of pained, worried expressions as Albert’s confident wife Elizabeth. I didn’t even recognize Guy Pearce as the rakish yet vaguely effeminate Prince Edward. The film also reunites Firth with Jennifer Ehle, who plays Logue’s wife Myrtle here but is best known for playing Elizabeth Bennet to Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s canonical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Where screenwriter David Seidler and director Tom Hooper succeed most is in the film’s pacing. The story requires scenes of struggle for Prince Albert, but aside from the first, which introduces the film’s main dramatic element to the audience, we are never forced to endure the embarrassment for long. And while they sacrificed some historical accuracy by condensing the time Logue and the Prince worked together and by delaying the benefits the Prince received from the therapy until the final speech, it gave the film the necessary tension to allow that final speech – after England’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939 – to become an emotional crescendo that closes the film.

The most touching scene, other than the King’s success and the applause he receives from his inner circle (after they all clearly doubted his ability to do it), was when he returns from his coronation and his two daughters see him in full regalia. The two young actresses playing Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth (the current Queen Elizabeth II) are asked to do very little in this film, but their expressions are priceless: he left the house as “Daddy,” but returned as a king, and I doubt there’s a little girl in the world who wouldn’t be impressed to see her father in that costume.

Two interesting side notes on this film: The writer delayed pursuing production of the film at the request of King George VI’s widow Elizabeth (known to my generation as the Queen Mother or the “Queen Mum”), who asked him to wait until after her death because she found the memories of that period too painful; and (per Wikipedia) nine weeks before filming began, someone discovered several of Logue’s notebooks from that time period, allowing the writer to incorporate some of that material into the final version of the script.

Next film in the queue is True Grit. Several of your top suggestions, including Inception, The Lives of Others, and The Social Network, aren’t available for rental on iPad, so they’ll have to wait a bit.

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