B-b-baad

Rating: 2/10 (4 March 2011)

As I usually enjoy ye olde British toff flick (cue Another country, Remains of the day, the best of them all) I gave it a go. I still scratch my head at the plethora of awards/nominations this film has been credited with. Firth did a decent job, no more, sometimes moving, sometimes hamming it up cringe-worthily. Strange casting too, if the real Bertie had had his authority, looks and presence he probably would never had had a stammer to begin with. Do unloved bullied children grow up to be like this? Firth never once comes across as an insecure terrified man.
Gary Oldman would have been my choice, he has the maturity by now not to portray the king as a maniac (as you might think) but he would have brought the fragility needed for the part and I am quite sure he can pull off a royal caught in royal trappings. Rush is great, he steals every scene he's in and he has the best lines to work with. Still the script is so predictable (the "break up") and the jokes are so lame he probably was sleepwalking during shooting, yet given the powerhouse this actor is he still played everybody off the park.
Bonham-Carter has the same hair as the real queen and this is where the similarities end. No common spirit whatsoever, the queen according to the books was approachable, a tad mumsy, devoted to her husband and steely in her protectiveness towards him. B-C comes across as a snobby, patronizing wife who pads his arm when the speaking gets tough. Pearce did OK and at least slightly resembled the original. The legendary Claire Bloom came out of retirement for two days, delivered one sentence, took the money and hopefully never looked back. This was not a cameo, this was an insult to a great actress.
The camera was awful, the worst fog and rain scenes I ever witnessed on the big screen, and there was one single original frame in the whole movie, the view from the balcony of Buckingham palace. So this is what THEY see. How funny. Further we are offered spectacular (err) pictures of an interbellum airplane which lands on a field. Otherwise talking heads, and the lame editing didn't contribute either to visualize the king's torment. As for the music, I'll get to that disaster later.
The set decoration of Lionel's work place was great. Westminster Abbey was terrible CGI. The church in The Pillars of the Earth looked better!
All the dreadful stuff was really topped when the king gave The Speech. The sequence was totally undermined by the worst elevator music I have ever come across and when the "director" (shame on you once again, academy)cut away from the struggling Bertie to show us salt of the earth British factory workers, families and BBC staff listening to the speech teary eyed I was ready to puke. They all most probably did listen teary eyed but the way this moment was handled was just awful, the muzak killed any emotion the viewer might have had. Even the worst German TV movie (and they mostly are insufferable) would shy away from this syrupy pathos.
And don't even get me started on Spall's Churchill and that the director" couldn't even bother to cast the little princesses according to type. Going to the core of a historic figure and his torment i. e. taking a risk? No, you get a Richard Curtis sequence of "hilarious" exercises and the ONE scene where you could sense the reasons for it all is handled absolutely uninspired, poor Colin, his best scene and all you get is a throwaway byline.
To sum it up: A kitsch fest which I can only recommend for a Sunday when you absolutely have nothing else to do. Beats window cleaning, I guess.