Expert Filmmaking, Firth's Powerful Performance, Make You Care

Rating: 9/10 (26 December 2010)

"The King's Speech" utterly surprised me with how much it made me care, right from the start, straight through to the end. I was on the verge of tears a few times. I did not expect to have this reaction to a movie about a rich and privileged man's relatively minor troubles.
I'm not an anglophile. I don't care about the British royal family. I don't suffer from a fear of speaking publicly. It would be easy for me to dismiss the problems presented in this movie as ridiculous, trivial nonsense: the king of England has trouble speaking? Who cares? He's one of the richest, most powerful men in the world. A speech impediment is a minor problem.
The power of the film itself, and Colin Firth's heartrending performance, made me care deeply, from the beginning of the film to the end. That's the power of excellent filmmaking. A great film takes a struggle and a person you think you might not care about, and makes both seem as intimate to you as your own life.
Colin Firth, in "The King's Speech," gives one of the best performances I've ever seen. He outdoes himself. His role is very low key. He isn't an action figure. He doesn't do much of anything but slowly, and with dread, approach microphones, and attend speech therapy sessions, but he is overwhelmingly sympathetic, even when he behaves in an arrogant or snobbish fashion.
Firth brings the message home: rich and powerful people are human, too, have heartaches and face challenges.
Helena Bonham-Carter is crisp and cool as his wife. Her performance did not draw me in. Geoffrey Rush didn't grab me the way Firth did. Guy Pearce is excellent as King Edward VIII, but he is on screen all too briefly. Firth carries the film.
The production values are first rate. Mansions, horses, period costumes: all sumptuous and convincing.
There is key, brief newsreel footage of Adolph Hitler. Hitler was a mesmerizing speaker. King George needed to be able to speak once England went to war with Nazi Germany.
I kept waiting for the film to tell us what caused the king's speech impediment, how other speech therapists of the day were treating it, and what Lionel Logue did differently. I never got definitive answers to any of those questions. Logue, it is said, achieved the results he achieved with his compassion, and I didn't see that in Rush's performance. His studio struck me as a large, cold, dirty, empty, uninviting room, and Rush's Logue often seemed more irritating in his boundary violations and sarcasm than compassionate.
One serious flaw in the film – its Christophobia. In a cartoonish performance, Derek Jacobi, with very bad hair, portrays Archbishop Cosmo Lang as an evil snake. Read about Lang: he's not the caricatured villain this film foolishly makes him out to be.
Complaints are minor. This is a terrific film.