Royally rousing

Rating: 6/10 (18 January 2011)

Tom "The Damned United" Hooper's tub-thumping biopic concerns Prince Albert, a frustrated stammerer who would become King George VI on the eve of the Second World War, following his hedonistic brother Edward's (Guy Pearce) tipple-topple from the throne.
The script may be as sharp as a Stanley knife, but in the end, for all its tears, both joyful and sad, this is a mostly simple and predictable movie with a softness and stageyness occasionally at odds with its own sense of grandeur and the grim era it depicts. Which isn't to dismiss it as fluffy or irrelevant.
Some critics have complained that the film comes across as royalist. But this is a decidedly personal story; that the ramifications of the events have far-reaching consequences serves to enhance the universality of the condition and the cure. In short, putting a plot in a palace is a fast-track to an exaggerated reality. The tragedy is that Bertie is a shrunken man when the country wants BIG.
Hooper has directed a reluctant leader before, in the form of John Adams. The sense of self-doubt harboured by the Second President may have been somewhat more subtly portrayed – but then Paul Giamatti did have 500 minutes to do it. So, given the breadth of the journey, Firth's performance is masterful: the physical, externalised flip-side to A Single Man's taut, internal anguish. Rush is solid as ever as the aphoristic Lionel Logue, while Helena Bonham-Carter has a hoot as the snappy Queen Mother.
In possibly the film's best scene, while mending a model aeroplane, Bertie speaks of his younger brother, the epileptic Johnny. My mind was flung back to Stephen Poliakoff's The Lost Prince (also featuring a gruff if slightly more avuncular Michael Gambon), which was the better, more challenging film. But Hooper's film is an enjoyable, unapologetic crowd-pleaser nonetheless.