![]() ![]() "Makes it official then, doesn't it?" Slowly, Bertie opens up to his new friend about his unhappy childhood, and doesn't notice how his speech is improving. (Might Hooper and Seidler have considered making Logue do the "popinjay" speech by Hotspur from Henry IV Part One – the Shakespeare character traditionally played as a stammerer? Too obvious?) In his script, Seidler creates sharp exchanges as Logue fearlessly barges through the pompous royal formality that's all part of the problem, cheerfully deriding his previous medical advisers: "They're all idiots!" "They've been knighted!" splutters Bertie. ![]() We see him trying out for an amateur company by doing Richard III's "winter of our discontent" soliloquy. He is a failed actor who is everywhere patronised as a colonial, especially by the toffee-nosed English theatrical types for whom he still hopefully auditions. This is where Lionel Logue comes in – a bullish Australian with bohemian manners and shabby premises on Harley Street. Spectacle must not be replaced by dead air. It's not just a matter of looking frightfully regal on a horse, the monarch has to be able to master the radio microphone. His formidable father, played by Michael Gambon with England's gruffest beard, makes clear to him that this is a new media age. His stammer means he can hardly get a word out, and the nation cringes with embarrassment. It is his first public appearance, required to speak through a microphone to vast crowds at the empire exhibition at Wembley stadium, and via live radio to the nation. The movie cleverly casts a new light on the dysfunctional tremor at the heart of Britain's royal family, and cheekily suggests there was a time when a British monarch experimented with psychoanalysis, disguised as speech therapy.įirth's face is a picture of misery in the opening scene, under his top hat, as if attending his own funeral. Like Shaw's Eliza Doolittle, the poor King as a younger man is forced to speak with his mouth full of marbles, and comes close to Eliza's fate of swallowing one.īut where she had to smarten up and talk proper, George VI (formerly the Duke of York, always known as "Bertie") has to move in the other direction: he has to loosen up, be less formal, less clenched, less clinically depressed. These characters are performed with pure theatrical gusto by Colin Firth as the miserably afflicted monarch, Geoffrey Rush as the twinkly eyed speech coach and Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen who has to learn to like Logue by overcoming her own snobbery – which she incidentally never troubles to disguise as shyness.Īs well as this, the movie is an intriguing, if slightly loaded new perspective on the abdication crisis of 1936. Written by David Seidler and directed by Tom Hooper, The King's Speech is a richly enjoyable, instantly absorbing true-life drama about the morganatic bromance between introverted stammerer King George VI and his exuberant Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue: an affair brokered by George's shrewd wife in her pre-Queen-Mum incarnations as the Duchess of York, and then Queen Elizabeth. ![]() Set in the 1920s and 30s, it is populated by that sort of well-suited patrician Englishman of yesteryear who drinks spirits in the middle of the day, whose middle and index fingers are rarely to be seen without an elegant cigarette interposed, and who pronounces the word "promise" as "plwomise" (try it). It is a don't-change-the-game-er, or yet a jolly-well-change-it-back-er: a traditionally mounted, handsomely furnished British period movie, available at a cinema near you in dead-level 2D. S ome films are known as "game-changers".
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