It's Trying To Be The King.

Rating: 8/10 (8 January 2012)

Nobody looks much like the Windsors, and "Churchill" doesn't look much like Churchill, but it doesn't matter much in this suspenseful, comic, and human story of the future King George VI (Firth) learning to overcome his stammering under the idiosyncratic tutelage of his speech therapist (Rush). It's a good movie.
The period covered in from the early 1930s to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. They weren't easy years for England. The Great Depression was world wide. Hitler had come to power in Germany and was threatening war. And King George V (Gambon) died and left the crown to the somewhat flighty Edward VIII (Pearce). It didn't take much to be flighty. At his father's death bed, Pearce breaks down and weeps on his mother's shoulder instead of maintaining the requisite stiff upper lip. On top of that, Pearce is sleeping with the ex flapper Wallace Simpson, who is not only an American from Baltimore but twice divorced. When Pearce follows his bliss and resigns, the Kinghood is thrust on Firth who, for the life of him, cannot give a speech without a discrediting stutter.
But the story itself isn't unfamiliar. He hires Rush to help him and Rush, a failed Australian actor with no medical credentials, uses the usual means to aid him in grappling with the king's problem. He taunts him, calls him "Bertie" instead of using the honorific, bets him shillings and then keeps bringing the debt up when Firth has lost. He has Firth doing silly thing like rolling around on the floor and speaking while his Firth's wife sits on his chest. Some of his techniques sound more useful. At a difficult juncture, Firth should pause and think to himself, "God save the king." (Firth: "I do, but no one seems to be listening.") In any case, in the shadow of dark clouds of anxiety and uncertainty, Firth manages successfully to wend his way through his first war-time speech, while Rush stands before him waving his hands like a conductor. That is to say, there's a happy ending.
The direction by Tom Hooper is clean and functional. The camera is handled in a manner fit for adults -- and why not? Nobody who gets his rocks off watching human bodies being torn apart is going to bother with a movie about some Ancient King of England or someplace who has trouble giving a speech. And who is this "Hitler", anyway? The performances are unimpeachable. I don't know that Firth exactly stammers. He seems to hesitate, repeat morphemes, gulp, and smack his lips a lot. As his wife, Helena Bonham Carter is cute and perfectly competent. Rush gives a marvelously sensitive performance despite its occasional formulaic moments.
In real life, the Rush figure was given an award for special assistance to the king. A similar award should be given to Production Design, Set Decoration, and Art Direction for special assistance rendered to "The King's Speech." One look at Rush's flat is enough to spoil your appetite. That title, by the way, "The King's Speech", I take to have a double meaning -- one is Firth's manner of speaking, the other is to the triumphant final speech he manages to deliver successfully over the BBC.
Don't be put off by the subject, which sounds trivial. It's a nicely planned and executed job.