The King's Speech (4/5 Stars)

A model of courage

As it is pointed out by King George VI, played by Colin Firth, a modern monarch has no real power. They can’t declare war or raise taxes or write laws. But they are kept on as figureheads because when the king speaks, the people believe that he speaks for them. “But I can’t sp…speak,” he stammers. The King of England has a speech impediment that routinely humiliates him whenever he must make a public speech, which is often. Meanwhile on the other side Europe is Adolf Hitler, the very most of which can be said about him is that he was a very good public speaker.

The Director of this splendid historical drama is none other than Tom Hooper, the man behind the incredible HBO John Adams mini-series (something every American student should be shown in school). Some directors you are thankful exist. Tom Hooper is one of them. He not only tells good stories. He is also keeping alive our heritage and history. And he does it in a way that is engaging and easily accessible. The people in his movies, though royalty, don’t seem to be acting as if they are aware of their place in history. They act like real people in their own time period. They are even given throwaway lines that assert personal fears that we know in our time period they shouldn’t be worried about. For example King George asserts that the English royalty should be worried about being done away with. He names the Czar in Russia and Cousin Wilhelm in Germany as examples. It is a reasonable fear but only at that time and in that place. It takes a writer/director who is unafraid of historical accuracy and has faith in the audience’s sense of empathy to allow his main character to say something obviously wrong. Someone who is aware of the faults of history (not those who say look upon the Founding Fathers or the writers of the Bible as omniscient gods) will smile when certain events and characters are brought up in this movie, their human foibles in full view. (Case in point: We get to meet Neville Chamberlain who talks a little about his misperceptions about Hitler.) We are also presented with another old friend from history books, a Sir Winston Churchill, played by Timothy Spall, always with cigar and drink in hand. This is a great character that surely deserves his own great movie. But that doesn’t mean Tom Hooper is afraid to use him in a supporting role, milling around the background of certain scenes and giving choice quotes from time to time. Hooper gets away with this because he knows enough about the historical period to know when or where he can make Churchill show up and still be accurate. Who knows what anybody actually said? In the end it really doesn’t matter because the audience should know that it is literally impossible to tell a personal story of a historical person and be totally factual. The most any historical biopic can do is get all the details of the period right and make what the characters say and do as plausible as possible through tons of research. This is what Hooper routinely does.

Nobody nowadays can remember this, but King George (or “Bertie” as he was called by his family) wasn’t the big royal story during the 1930s. People were much more interested in his older brother Prince Edward, played by Guy Pearce, and his romance with Wallis Simpson, the woman he would abdicate the throne for in order to marry. Now that was a huge thing. Sometimes though it takes 80 years to realize who was indeed the more interesting person. Edward is the perfect foil for Bertie. He is selfish, uninterested in his duty, and oblivious to the great need of his people for a strong leader in dire times. On first blush it may not seem obvious why King George is a courageous person for giving wartime speeches to the nation while fighting a stammer. But this movie makes clear that he really didn’t have to do it. He could have been like his brother. He could have abdicated the throne. He could have refused to make the speeches. He could have simply not cared. I can only imagine what the people of England felt when they heard those wartime speeches knowing full well that all the pauses were mainly due to the king’s herculean effort to get the words out straight and true. It must be hard for a king, with all his wealth and prestige, to show solidarity with a suffering people. Standing in front of a national audience doing the thing you hate and fear the most is perhaps as close as a monarch can get.

A cynical person would look upon Colin Firth’s performance as “Oscar Bait.” And they would be right. There is nothing the Academy likes better than physical impediments, except of course royalty. This role has both. But that doesn’t mean Firth is undeserving. He really gets the whole thing down perfectly, (and I learned quite a lot about speech impediments in the meantime.) Most of the movie takes place in the office of the speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played cheerfully by Geoffrey Rush. He is an unconventional therapist who insists that he and the king be on a first name basis and that the therapy shouldn’t simply be mechanical. This is awkward because one of them is royalty. But really there is no choice. Bertie has already been to every other speech therapist. Joining them several times or waiting out in the lobby drinking tea is the Queen, played by that woman of unique beauty Helena Bonham Carter. She does a good job too. They all do a good job.

p.s. This movie is Rated R. It should be rated G. The reason it is R is because Bertie doesn’t stammer when he curses and under doctor’s orders he is told that when he feels his mouth clogging, he should curse as loud as he can. (Only in the privacy of the office of course.) So there is one scene where he shouts, “Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, shit, bugger, Fuck!” And that is why the movie is R. If there is any movie that makes certain the idiocy of an objective rating system it is, “The King’s Speech,” a noble story about perseverance and duty, which I would argue is fit even for kindergartners.  As a student of law I understand the point of an objective system. It is only fair to put movie-makers on notice as to what exactly constitutes an “R” rating. Two “Fucks” is an R. Everybody knows that. But this standard ignores the most important thing that parents should be considering and that is the context of the story and more importantly whether the movie is any good. These are matters of taste and though any freedom of speech loving person would be aghast at the idea of somebody rating something via such a judgmental prism as “good taste,” I would argue that if the rating system doesn’t consider taste than it is completely pointless and we shouldn’t have it at all. The way it is now, we make no distinction over how the objectionable content is shown or told. Thus, the blood and gore of responsible redemptive movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” or “The Passion of the Christ,” is equal to the most disgusting sadistic torture porn like “Saw I-VII." Nor does an objective standard actually prohibit objectionable content from creeping in anyways. Many comedies make it a mission to find a way to say the naughty things they want to say without actually saying it. Just take a look at the movie “Little Fockers.” The title is a joke and the punch line is “Fuck.” But the movie is PG-13 even though it couldn’t be more obvious. Besides the movie is terrible. Why are we telling parents that this is better than, “The King’s Speech”?