THE QUEEN A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2006 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): *** 1/2
It's quite possible that the king and queen will take away the top acting awards at this year's Academy Awards -- that would be Forest Whitaker in THE KING OF SCOTLAND and Helen Mirren in THE QUEEN, and both films, coincidentally, open today. While Whitaker doesn't exactly play a king, Helen Mirren certainly does play a queen. Normally a gifted actress who essentially plays herself in her various characters, this time Mirren makes a chameleon-like transformation. She doesn't just play Queen Elizabeth II; Mirren becomes her in a perfect meld of mind and body. While Whitaker is only reasonably assured of an Oscar nomination, Mirren, it could be argued, has a near lock on actually winning the statuette for her tour de force work in THE QUEEN.
Director Stephen Frears (MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS) paints a harsh and very unflattering picture of the queen during her most trying week ever. After Princess Diana -- a.k.a. Princess Di and the "people's princess" -- dies, the queen's hatred of her ex-daughter-in-law is so intense that the queen lets her emotions and her unwavering belief in upholding traditions cause her to make one stupid decision after another. This almost causes the British people to turn their collective backs on the monarchy.
The queen's unlikely savior appears in the person of a young, new Prime Minister from the Labour Party, Tony Blair. Michael Sheen, a Blair look-alike, gives a funny, delightful and inviting performance as Blair. With a level of acting quality that sometimes rivals Mirren's, Sheen deserves the Academy's attention too when it comes nominating time. His Blair is an awkward schoolboy type who is lectured by his sovereign -- she points out to him that he is her tenth prime minister and that Winston Churchill was her first -- as she puts him firmly in his place. No matter how disdainfully she treats him, he still keeps trying to help her. The net result is that, as we lose all sympathy for her, we end up transferring our sympathy to him, as if there were some fundamental law of physics about the conservation of sympathy.
As the world mourns the lost of the princess, who was always in the headlines during her life, the queen is in denial about the importance of the death and its lasting effect on the British people. The queen and her husband Prince Philip (James Cromwell) talk about shooting wildlife and the trivialities of their life far away from London in their Scottish castle, where they are spending the summer. The queen goes so far as to instruct her chaplain not to mention the princess's death at the Sunday service. Not wanting to upset the princess's children is given as the nominal reason. Mirren is so perfectly stiff giving these absurd edicts that one is shocked watching the movie. After the queen initially refuses to break a 400-year-old tradition and fly a flag at half mast over Buckingham Palace, a completely befuddled Blair mused to his staff, "Will someone please save this family from themselves?"
Tony Blair gets little sympathy himself at home for his constantly rebuked attempts to help the floundering queen. His wife Cherie (Helen McCrory), a woman known to hold "anti-monarchist tendencies," calls the Queen and her entire family, "a bunch of free-loading, emotionally-retarded nutters."
Director Frears does provide the queen a bit of a fig leaf in the last act. Throughout most of the movie, she is as vulnerable as a rich old woman who is stripped of her clothes and forced to go to work naked. It is an unflattering portrait. But, Frears does eventually offer up a little motivation for her actions, so that we don't leave the theater with a complete loss of respect for her. To what extent the film is true, I can't say. I do know that Frears's hatchet job is singularly effective, like a strongly negative political ad that goes straight for the jugular. The result is a fascinating film and a mesmerizing story.
THE QUEEN runs a perfectly paced 1:37. It is rated PG-13 for "brief strong language" and would be acceptable for kids around 10 and up.
The film is playing in limited release now in the United States. In the Silicon Valley, it is showing at the Century theaters.
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