Oscar bait? Yes. But good show all round.

Rating: 9/10 (28 December 2010)

I went to see The King's Speech with my dad and grandmother today. It lived up to my expectations: a lovely movie, and currently one of my top 5 favorites from this year. If I had one criticism, it would be that the film seemed to milk the emotion of certain scenes a bit too much: quicker cutaways would have made certain scenes just a wee bit better. But in general everything was excellent. The script was sharp and witty, the cinematography quite pleasing (although there were far too many shots with a person on the far left side of the screen to my tastes, and nothing to the right), the music beautiful (both the Beethoven excerpts and Alexandre Desplat's original score), and the acting was, of course, superb. Colin Firth, to my mind, has been coasting on his Mr. Darcy image for the last decade or so, with a steady diet of light romantic fare that doesn't really show him at his best. As the stuttering George VI, he is definitely working in a new direction. And the resultant performance is superb. In a role like this, one could easily resort to caricature -- Firth doesn't even brush with it. The last ten minutes alone may win him his long-awaited Oscar.
Geoffrey Rush may also run away with a little golden statue this year: he is by turns funny, wry, and sympathetic as Lionel Logue, and his scenes with Firth are invariably the highlights of the film. Helena Bonham Carter gives one of her most effective performances in recent memory as George's wife (the current queen mother); I only wish that one of her lines from the trailer had been left in, in which she says, "I intend to be a very good queen ... to a very great king" -- that simple cut may have cost her an Oscar.
Out of the other actors, Guy Pearce stands out for his brash and irresponsible Edward VIII. But really the whole cast is culled out of the depths of the British acting aristocracy: Derek Jacobi, Jennifer Ehle, Michael Gambon, Claire Bloom, Timothy Spall, Anthony Andrews ... the names just keep coming.
Credit must go to director Tom Hooper for putting together such a wonderful film. This is only his third film, and the first to get any sort of major press, but he has had an award-winning TV career with such dramas as John Adams, Elizabeth I, and one of my favorite miniseries of all time, Daniel Deronda. It's nice to see his work on the big screens at last. The guy's a genius, and I'll definitely be looking forward to what he puts out next.