“I made this for people to see. I didn’t make this for the award season, I made this for people to have an experience in the cinema.” – Tom Hooper , Director of The King’s Speech
The King’s Speech, an idea David Seidler initially conceived over thirty years ago, appears to be Oscar-ready. The film will be a front-runner for multiple nominations including Best Picture, Best Director (Tom Hooper), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actor for Colin Firth’s portrayal of the man who would become King George VI. Firth has dismissed the buzz, saying “People using that kind of language is basically code for ‘This is a really good movie for more people than you might think’.” Geoffrey Rush co-stars as Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue who helped King George VI battle a debilitating stutter. So…are all the reviews declaring that the film’s Oscars are already in the bag enough of a reason to see it? The Weinsteins (distributors and executive producers of the film) certainly hope so.
“If I’m not making a film, I’m researching a film. Even during the shoot, I’ll be reading things and checking things because how can you be casual about that? These are real people’s lives and you owe them the respect of doing all the work you can to try and find it out.” – Tom Hooper
Tom Hooper has become know for his films about historical, political subjects like Elizabeth I and the HBO miniseries John Adams. The King’s Speech fits right into that body of work. Part of what allowed this project to finally come to fruition was the passing of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. Seidler was introduced to Lionel Logue’s son who had his father’s notebooks. The son agreed to give Seidler the notebooks if The Queen Mother approved. Seidler sought permission to tell the story but The Queen Mother did not want it told while she was still living, saying it was too painful for her. She passed away twenty-eight years later. The notebooks, which had never been shared before, contained a wealth of information about the characters that would take center stage in The King’s Speech. Then, nine weeks before filming began, Hooper gained access to Logue’s diaries through his grandson. Hooper describe the diaries as a “treasure trove.” Even some of the dialogue was pulled from the diaries. And I have to admit . . . one of the examples that I read of this was a line towards the end of the film which I thought stood out as too pat-too “film scripty”–and yet it was actually something straight from the diaries: after the King’s final speech, Lionel turns to the King and says, “You still stammered on the W,” and the King says, “Well, I had to throw in a few so they knew it was me.” I guess sometimes life can be “scripty.” My mistake.
This was a personal project for both the director and writer. Hooper was initially drawn to the project because of his English-Australian background. He had always been interested in finding a project that dealt with the English-Australian-ness of his own upbringing. It was actually Hooper’s Mum that found The King’s Speech. She went to see a play reading at a tiny fringe theatre (Seidler wrote a stage script before the screenplay). She then called her son and told him that she’d found his next film. In the end, Seidler ended up writing two versions of The Kings Speech–the play version is slated to open next year in London with Adrian Noble directing. And Seidler has his own special connection to the material. As Hooper relayed, “I think the script is only good because David [Seidler] was a stammerer and has childhood memories of King George VI. It’s a classic example – if as a writer you talk about a subject that’s closest to your heart, more likely than not you’re actually going to write a great piece . . . I think David’s written the best film of his life and he’s written it because he’s talking about his childhood and the most traumatic time in his childhood, and he knows it.”
The film contains excellent turns from both Firth and Rush (as one would expect). They seem to have a genuine affection for each other on screen. Class is brought to the role of Elizabeth (George VI’s wife) by Helena Bonham Carter. It is also through her character that the issues of class difference are brought out. One must remember that Logue was an Australian and Australia, in the 1930s, was still viewed by the English with colonial contempt. Australia was seen as a country full of convicts and sheep. Elizabeth’s seeking out of Logue to help her husband was, ultimately, a desperate. Her scenes in Logue’s workspace are great. These are the scenes where having an actress of Carter’s caliber truly pays dividends.
“I think what’s interesting about if you compare Peter[ Morgan’s, The Queen] film and this film is that they’re both about the effects of the mass media on the institution of the monarchy. My film is about the effect of the coming of mass media through the radio, which created this huge pressure on the King to become an actor and a performer.” – Tom Hooper
And while The King’s Speech is enjoyable, it plays like a conventional British period drama. As anyone who is familiar with that genre knows, the acting will be superb (with the supporting roles filled with great actors like Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi – himself memorable as the stuttering Emperor Claudius of so many moons ago, Claire Bloom, etc.). There are plenty of pretty settings and costumes for the eyes. And the soundtrack is filled with the greatest hits of classical music. But it was the soundtrack that really bothered me. King George VI’s climactic, final speech of the film, delivered on the eve of England’s entry into WWII, is underscored entirely with Beethoven’s 7th. An amazing piece of music to be sure, but it so overwhelmed the moment that I could not appreciate what the character on screen was going through. It was a moment where we, as an audience, were not being trusted to have an emotional reaction to the moment for its own merits. Yet if the film was successful up to that point, we shouldn’t have needed music at all. It was overkill in the worst way and ruined the entire film for me. I am not against crowd-pleasing fare, but I hate not being trusted. So if you like these sort of Brit dramas, by all means go see it for the performances, but know that you will not be asked to do any heavy lifting. Oscars, here we come.
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