George VI (Colin Firth) has a problem in The King's Speech
The King’s Speech. Written by David Seidler. Directed by Tom Hooper.
There are almost as many reasons not to see The King’s Speech as there were British monarchs in the 20th century. To the timorous, predictable casting of regulars like Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter as royals, one can’t help but yawn. The King’s Speech may also be the textbook example of a movie straining to sell a dubious historical premise—namely, that King George IV’s lifelong struggle with his stammer had something to do with saving Britain from the Nazis. Can a nation with a leader as eloquent as Winston Churchill really be said to have been wanting in rhetorical assets? Everybody remembers that Churchill said something about “finest hours” and “so much owed by so many to so few.” Truth be told, nobody remembers anything George VI said in five long years of war.
Then again, one doesn’t actually have to see the movie to have those objections. That done, I can report that The King’s Speech does a terrific job of making trivial history seem significant. Indeed, it’s more convincing than many other movies about things that actually mattered. For that at least, it deserves some kind of credit.
The script by David Seidler (Tucker: the Man and His Dream) is one big reason why. George VI (Firth), as our grandparents knew, came to the throne by accident, after the shocking abdication of his older brother Edward VIII (Guy Pearce). The latter had fallen in love with an American named Wallis Simpson (Eve Best), who was thought unfit to be Queen because she was divorced. Faced with the choice between love and pomp, Edward chose love—leaving his shy, stammering brother “Bertie” with the mess.
Stuttering, especially in a celebrity, is an interior struggle cruelly played out in public. Seidler hinges his story on the unlikely friendship between the frustrated King and speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a provincial and certifiable eccentric from the wrong side (Perth) of the wrong continent (Australia). Rush plays Logue as the anti-Henry Higgins—someone who believes the mechanics of speech have more to do with emotions and intimacy than the movements of fleshy bits. By any other name, he’s a shrink, which is what His Majesty needs but precisely what he fears. Watching Logue/Rush make his assault on the King’s precious formalities is one of the film’s great pleasures.
Good as Rush is, he’s not likely to get as much attention as Colin Firth. Having built a career on playing a good-looking stiffs, Firth now has the rich opportunity—and apparently the talent—to amass accolades in deconstructing that image. He made a good start as a closeted gay professor in Tom Ford’s A Single Man. In The King’s Speech, however, he takes it all to a new level, presenting Bertie alternately as a stout, self-deprecating adult, strong enough to carry a nation on his shoulders, and as a churlish, insecure child, longing to be seen instead of just gawked at. You don’t have to be convinced that his struggle was fundamentally that important (I’m still not) to grant that Firth has done something quite rare here: he’s made inherited privilege and casual snobbery seem appealing. In its subtleties, its vulnerabilities that snap in and out of view with mercurial quickness, it may be the performance of the year.
Interestingly, though Seidler’s script bleeds for Bertie, it doesn’t have much sympathy for poor Edward, who sacrificed so much for love. Indeed, Pearce plays him as the worst kind of coward, bullying his afflicted brother while giving up his manhood to a vulgarian in a skirt. (There’s an impolite term for his condition that involves a feline with a whip.) In this, the film seems strikingly ungracious—that good old British “carry on” spirit is rightly inadequate for Bertie, who needs a sympathetic ear, but good enough for Edward, who should really just snap out of his dependence on that American bitch. After all, there are limits! Seidler and director Tom Hooper have no patience for Edward’s plight, but weren’t his pitiful dependence and Bertie’s stammer really aspects of the same problem?
In fact, neither of the two monarchs had any real power. Toward the end of the film we hear that someone who did, Sir Winston (Timothy Spall), also struggled with his speech. Did screenwriter Seidler, after he wrote that scene, look up and wonder why he wasn’t telling that story—about how one of the most inspiring and significant speakers of his era overcame his impediment? Or do the personal struggles of mere politicians always count less than the tears of a king?
Copyright 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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