The King's Speech Has a Royally Good Script

The King’s Speech

Directed by Tom Hooper

118 minutes, Rated R (lest some one somewhere has never heard a swear)

* * * *

The King’s Speech is a rhetorical pas de deux between Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush that restores one’s faith in what can happen when you put a strong script in front of two superb actors. Can you imagine? Two hours and nothing blows up, nobody drops trou, and there are no action figures to save half the world by slaughtering the other half. It’s amazing that this film plays at the local mall!

Colin Firth plays England’s Duke of York, the man who never really wanted to be a monarch, but was forced to become King George VI when his brother David (Edward VIII) took up with the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson and was forced to abdicate. (British law forbids a monarch to marry a divorced person if the ex-spouse is still alive.) Poor Prince Albert (“Bertie”) wasn’t even comfortable being a duke because it demanded public appearances and he stuttered like a woodpecker snacking on an insect-laden log. He’s tried everything to tame a stammer made even worse by the unspeakably awful family he was born into. Were it not for his kind wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), he’d have given up trying long ago. When all else fails, Elizabeth steers him to the shabby basement office/home of Lionel Logue (Rush), a failed Australian actor living in London and (barely) eking out a living giving elocution lessons and treating vocal impairments.

It’s a story of how Bertie and Lionel connect, despite considerable odds and seemingly insurmountable social barriers. This film is being touted as an Oscar favorite and its already gotten won awards and seven Golden Globe nominations. This is due more to the disappointing quality of the competition than the strength of this one. This is a very enjoyable film, but it’s no masterpiece. It is a testament to David Seidler’s screenplay that we care at all. On the face of it, nothing really happens in the film. It’s one big strip tease as to whether or not Bertie can make a 1939 radio speech committing England to war against Germany. That’s pretty thin stuff, and of course he does or there’s no bloody movie. (In truth, Bertie had worked with Logue for twelve years by then and had grown more comfortable with public speaking.)

It’s the witty and wicked exchange between Firth and Rush that make this film worth viewing. The two are delightful together, especially in moments in which Firth seeks to maintain royal composure and Rush seeks to annihilate it. Firth is a strong candidate to win the Best Actor Oscar this year. That would not be a travesty, though he should have gotten the statue last year for A Single Man, a superior film and performance. For my money, though, I can’t imagine a better Supporting Actor role than Rush as Lionel Logue. See this film. Don’t expect gold, but it does pack the delight of hitting the jackpot on the quarter slots.

A big “Booo! Hiss!” to the idiots who rated this film R. Did it get that rating because some fire-breathing fundamentalist objected to the word “shit?” If you need more evidence on the irrelevancy of MPAA ratings, this is it.