"The N-N-N-azis are C-C-Coming!"

Rating: 6/10 (21 January 2011)

This film had me in its pocket for the first half hour or so. It depicts 1930s London in a grimly authentic way and Helena Bonham Carter is a rather fetching Queen Mother. Firth holds the screen and the two kids - one of them from Outnumbered, the other looking like a young Lily Allen - are charming. I enjoyed the relationship between the excellent Geoffrey Rush and Firth, even if it's a reversal of My Fair Lady, the commoner advising the posho on speech.
Then Michael Gambdon's King George V is wheeled out to deliver the most awful leaden-footed exposition, all about how Germany is in enthral to the Nazis and how Bertie's feckless brother is involved with this Wallis woman. Oh, it's going to be one of those films is it, I thought, and I was right. Though Firth and Rush continue to be very good, every so often there's this cack-handed exposition, a character popping up to deliver a Ladybird book version of history, to remind us why it's important that the second in line gets his elocution right. It's not really too accurate as this takes place in the mid-1930s, when Hitler really wasn't seen as that much of a threat, especially by the Royal family. Certainly Baldwin, the Prime Minister, had no particular opinion on him as yet, so they're truncating events big time. Okay, Churchill is wheeled out to say the same thing, (Timothy Spall in a role that could be out of Comic Strip) but Churchill was seen as a dog barking at the moon back then.
Exposition is like a hairpiece, if you notice it it's not doing its job right.
We're artlessly spoonfed information as to why Wallis Simpson is A Bad Person, just mean to accept it like some gullible courtier. With a line thrown in for American audiences: "It's not that she's American..." It's all too broadly written.
Otherwise just as Rush was too old to be Peter Sellers in his biopic, Firth is surely way too old to be the Bertie and looks a lot older than Guy Pearce, who is meant to be his older brother. Anthony Andrews pops up as Baldwin and is unreconisable from his Bridehead days. Actually there's the sense that this script has been on the backburner for so long, Andrews might have been considered for the role of King Edward 20 years ago, and Pride and Prejudice's Jennifer Ehle, who is Logie's wife in this, would have made a decent fist of Wallis Simpson's bony carnality. And Firth would have been the right age.
By this time I was recasting the film in my mind, and came up with Brit comic David Mitchell as Bertie (the same voice as Firth) and his Peep Show compadre Robert Webb as the rakish, carefree Edward, that would have worked rather well. The whole thing at times had the feel of Churchill: The Movie.