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
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.