A Seamlessly Layered Multi-Faceted Visual Experience

Rating: 10/10 (14 February 2011)

Tom Hooper's extraordinarily self-possessed crowd-pleaser conveys by way of true cinematic form the account of a man duty-bound to speak to the world with a speech impediment. It must be excruciating enough for one who stutters to address another individual. To handle a radio microphone and know the British Empire is taking note must be a nightmare. At the time of the titular speech, a quarter of the world's people was in the Empire, and naturally they'd be listening, including Germany, with special interest.
Britain was going to war with Germany. King George VI's spectators needed resolve, precision and tenacity, not hesitant trip-overs disrupted with angst-ridden silences. This was a man who never sought to be king. After the death of his father, the throne was to succeed to his brother Edward. But Edward relinquished the throne to marry the woman he loved, and the responsibility fell to Prince Albert, who had grappled with his voice since childhood.
Hooper begins this thoroughly pleasurable film with an aesthetically top-notch point-of-view sequence of Albert, struggling to open the British Empire Exhibition in 1925. Before a packed stadium and a radio audience, he clutches in misery to make the words emerge correctly. His father, George V, has forever deemed "Bertie" a cut above his brother, though bewails the establishment of media, which entail a ruler to be seen and heard on broadcast events.
The triumph of the film comes, as far as I'm concerned, centrally from invariably being with and inside the king. Sensitively, we devote a vast amount in the character, and that understanding is delicately pushed along by using remarkable visual compositions. Wide lenses are used very close to the actors' faces to exceedingly evoke their and our emotional response, camera movement and lighting makes it persuasive and keeps us betrothed to the fearful ruler. Not only do I honor the audacious framing choices that visually share Bertie's discomforted struggle speaking, but there is also exquisite regeneration of the look of early color stocks.
At that 1925 speech, we see Bertie's wife, Elizabeth, her face beset with pity. As it grows apparent that Edward's fixation on Wallis Simpson is incorrigible, she realizes her Bertie may meet more public disgrace. He sees numerous speech therapists, one of whom tries the old marbles-in-the-mouth custom. Nothing works, and then she finds an unsuccessful Australian actor named Lionel Logue, who has set up a speech therapy practice.
Logue doesn't realize initially who is referring to him. And one of the focuses of the film is Logue's way of behaving toward crowned heads. He proposes to Albert that they speak in unceremonious terms. Albert has been reared within the majestic vacuum of the monarchy and take offense at such conduct, not because he has an eminent view of himself but because, well, it just isn't proper. But Logue understands that if he is to become the king's counselor, he must first become his acquaintance.
This handsomely produced film is abounding in period nuances and fastidious class differences. Director Tom Hooper makes fascinating choices with his locations and visuals. The movie is mainly shot in interiors, and most of those spaces are an impressively rendered composition overlapping the constricted with the expansive. That's extraordinary in historical dramas, which highlight scope and splendor and that. Here we have elongated passageways, a bottomless and tapered master control room for the BBC, rooms that appear markedly geometric.
The film mainly interests the actors Colin Firth, reserved and polite, and Geoffrey Rush, generous and outgoing, in psychosomatic labor. Helena Bonham Carter, who can be hardhearted, is here alive with benevolence, discretion and affection for her husband. This is the woman who became the beloved Queen Mother of our time, living to a hundred. As the men have a scuffle of self-control and spirit, she attempts to iron the situation. And in the broader realm, Hitler finds supremacy, war nears, Mrs. Simpson devastates, and the feared day looms when Bertie, as George VI, will have to address the world and wage war.
Hooper's handling of that loaded scene is virtuosic. Firth interjects his anxiety and keeps the obligatory, virtually British-patented fortitude in the face of adversity, while his personnel and family are frightened on his behalf as he strides toward a microphone as if were a gas chamber. It's the one scene in the film that must come off, and it does, and its poignant effect is astoundingly deep. Finally, what we have here is a first-class historical drama and a commanding intimate one. And two contraries who stay confidantes for the remainder of their lives.
The R rating concerns Logue's use of expletives. It's absolutely incomprehensible. This is an outstanding film for children and teenagers whose parents will blindly follow that they should forbid their kids from seeing it and let them see RED and the Twilight saga instead.
While I'm raving, I might as well add that I think it terribly sad to find criticism of Danny Cohen's cinematography on message boards on grounds that it doesn't follow basic rules of composition. It's not common to find a film that merges all aspects of the world it creates into such a seamlessly layered multi-faceted visual experience. Quite close to every film we see is either shot in wides for epic scope and majesty or from the small-scale voyeuristic perspective, and even on the rare occasion that a film does both, it's at any given moment doing either one or the other. By that token, one might go as far as to say that most films fail to capture half of the story they depict! That is, by the standards set by this transcendent picture.