Terrific screen writing, and two actors at their symbiotic best

Rating: 9/10 (8 March 2011)

The King's Speech (2010)
From the title itself through classic encounters of the king with the peasantry to the final speech of all speeches, "The King's Speech" is fast, smart, and literate. I say literate specifically because this is one witty, word-based movie. A brilliant one. It is visual, too, dramatically photographed (including some unusual extreme wide angle views--not fisheye as Manohla Dargis said), and it is acted with absolute skill. But above all, it is a work of words.
Appropriately.
David Seidler is the credited screenwriter here, and he has done mostly decent television writing. His one attempt that relates, for "The King and I" o (1999) was miserably received. Here, he is nothing short of sublime. It might seem easy to play with the conventions of British royalty (the stumbling for the proper words, the decorum), but the dialog goes well beyond that. It is largely a tale of two men, the man who would be King George VI and his speech therapist Lionel Logue, and no one knows what they said to one another.
The plot, however, is a given, sort of. The movie is based on fact in the broad sense--the king did have a stutter, Logue was an inventive therapist from Australia, German and Britain did go to war. Memoirs being what they are, and Logue's notebooks being only part of the story, the dialog has come under criticism for his truth. But watch this movie as a work of fiction, somehow, and you'll hear some of the sharpest speechwriting in recent years. Screenwriter David Seidler grew up with a stutter, has had a lifelong fascination with King George VI, and has recently battled cancer, which has a way of giving people perspective. All of this is audible in the film, start to finish.
And it's a very very funny movie, or witty in the dry sense. Nearly everything out of Colin Firth's mouth is hilarious, like an inner voice speaking out and surprising expectations. And Logue, played to a T by Geoffrey Rush, is equally hilarious, restrained perhaps but more theatrical by far. The two of them are stunning.
The movie is of course limited by its own intentions. Certain things--most things--cannot happen, and don't. The inventions are either liberties that they have gotten thrashed for (see Wikipedia for a long list of corrections) or are little inventions between the facts that make things airy and touching, realistic and pithy. The filming enhances this, and the use of deeply moving music punches up the gravitas more than anything.