Kneel before the King!

Rating: Null/10 (1 March 2011)

"Christians and camels receive their burdens kneeling." – Ambrose Bierce
"The King's Speech" revolves around King George the Sixth's battle with a speech impediment. Seeking a remedy he enlists the help of an Australian speech therapist. By the film's end, the King has conquered his stammer and declared war on Germany.
Like Stephen Frears' "The Queen", "Speech" is less a film than a cultural export cynically tailored to the market needs of anglophiles in search of some foreign culture. And like most of these films, it is content to appeal to a very fairy tale view of Buckingham Palace, fostering the kind of low-level cult of personality that helps sustain the British Monarchy.
Historically the film is mostly dishonest, but that should be expected. If Hollywood can turn the Holocaust into an amusement park ride, then surely Britain will have no trouble molesting history. And so the film whitewashes the Monarchy's selfish support of Baldwin, Chamberlain and Hitler, and seems unaware that they often wrote letters requesting that Jews and refugees not be allowed into England. Likewise, the film presents King George as a ridiculously good-natured guy (instead of the dimwit with a chronic drinking problem that he was), ridiculously over inflates the King's stammer (thereby making him more lovable and heroic), contributes further to the rosy mythologization of Winston Churchill, and reverses the fact that Churchill supported King George's Nazi sympathising brother (Edward VIII frequently stayed in Hitler's guest house).
Indeed, what one forgets is that virtually all the aristocracy in Europe at the time were closely related (WW2 is but a giant family feud). What's worse, they were all positively in love with Hitler, supported him dearly, and saw him as a tool to be used to crush the Jewish Marxist, communist and Bolshevik movements across Europe which were rightfully rising up against monarchist regimes. Why? Because the aristocracy wanted to hold onto power, and nothing ruins corporate profits faster than communism. History books are rife with passages featuring Churchill and FDR praising Hitler, Mussolini, Mein Kampf and even the very Governor of the Bank of England touting Hitler as a "good investment against Bolshevism".
End result: a pack of lies designed to trick you into sympathising with a guy solely so you can rally behind his war address. It's like a film about a blind George Bush struggling to read a teleprompter when announcing another Gulf War 2. Poor him.
What the film is really doing is using disability, and the King's speech impediment, as an obstacle which must be overcome so that the social body of a nation doesn't fragment. Covertly, the film says that those with differences must accommodate themselves to society, and that the need to sound "normal" is important because it not only makes the listener less uncomfortable, but fosters a unity which makes larger wars on "difference" (Jews, Germans, communists, unionists, radicals etc) possible. What the film does is play into Britian's myth of pre-War unity and solidarity, a lie which allows certain groups to pretend its hands were entirely clean.
Unsurprisingly, "Speech" offensively resonates with the climate in which it was released. Today, power figures and monarchs (many of whom are puppets, beholden to the US and UK) are being toppled across the Middle East, but in Britain, the Queen ("My Government is committed to helping families and businesses through difficult times," she says, as services are shut down across the country) and the Prime Minister (currently in the Middle East using speeches on "democracy" as a cover to sell arms to everyone in sight) are busy demanding that their subjects tighten their belts, bravely endure Recessions and unite in the adopting of national austerity measures. While this is going on, scandals involving bank bailouts, corporate bonuses, mass job cuts and tax exemptions (while the average person pays a third of their income in taxes, a firm like Barclay's Bank, of which the Queen is a majority shareholder, pays 1 percent) continue.
In "Speech", rich folk try to appease Hitler in order to protect their vast assets, before then asking Brits to ignore the Great Depression, tighten their belts, suck it up, and nobly go to war for their country. Today it's the same story, sold with the same buzzwords. And of course, in each case, the lingo serves only to stress how ordinary Royals/bankers/politicians are to the middle and lower classes; "The King's Speech" spends its entire running time reminding us that the King is "just like us" with "the very same problems".
But consider this. Throughout the film, the King and Lionel Logue, his speech therapist, refer to one another informally. Theirs is largely a relaxed relationship (Logue calls the King "Bertie") and it is only at the end that Logue concedes and calls the King "Your Majesty". It is here that the King earns reverence and ceases to be Logue's equal, the message being that deference and submission are proper, as long as they are deserved. Expect this film to soften the blow when the Queen announces possibly two extravagant royal weddings this year, as well as elaborate celebrations to mark her Diamond Jubilee. "We're all in this together" is the oft-repeated post-Recession, austerity catch phrase, but like the King's stammer, this phrase is just a red herring. A precursor to the war address. Today, twenty two out of twenty nine cabinet ministers (76 percent) are millionaires. Never has modern Britain been governed by such a narrow social base.
Like "Slumdog Millionaire", another Oscar winner, "Speech's" "triumph against the odds" fairy tale has attracted viewers, but it's mostly the King's three act homo-erotic love affair with Logue that resonates with them. The couple go through the standard "boy meets, loses and gets girl" formula, a journey which seems to appeal to the masses. But who's the girl in this relationship? The audience is, because they're the ones getting Royally f***ed.
5/10 – Worth one viewing.