mixed bag

Rating: 6/10 (27 January 2011)

The award season brouhaha seems focused on Firth's performance, and excellent though it is, I find it less characteristic and affecting than his turn in Ford's 'A Single Man.' Like 'The Queen' from four years ago, the British royal family is again the boat on which Britain attempts to take Hollywood. But 'The Queen' was a far more affecting film. Perhaps this is because 'The Queen' was so much more enigmatic, while 'The King's Speech' obvious: the king's doll-like daughters greeting him with "Your Majesty." Need a more obvious way to communicate the king's entrapment? The cruelty of the Duke of York's brother. The footage of "ordinary people" wincing at the king's stuttering. The cheap suspense created by Bertie not listening to his recording of "To be or not to be" until much later. All these are formulaic, and Hollywood formulaic, employed because the the filmmakers seem afraid that we would not be able to empathize with the character's speech impediment problem. But by overdoing it, they achieve the opposite.
This isn't to say that there are quite excellent moments. The fog-drenched streets when Helena Bonham-Carter, as "Mrs. Johnson," seeks out Lionel. The amplification of the stutter in the very first scene. The dinner during which the previous king dies.
The standout for me in this film, however, is Geoffrey Rush. The camera doesn't lavish nearly as much attention on him as it does on Firth, and Rush doesn't get a breakdown scene late in the movie to show off his acting chops, as does Firth. But Rush embodies all the contradiction in the film's supposed theme of an "unlikely friendship" between men of drastically unequal ranks. Whereas Firth ultimately seems energized and, indeed, two-dimensionally happy with his kingship, Rush's last address to his one-time patient is an enigmatic "Your Majesty." Does he admire what he's made, or does he now feel more than ever the disparity in their power? I think also to the expression Rush gives us when his oldest son announces news of WWII - how does Rush think of his "friend" who has the power to send his son to death in war? It is Rush's quiet performance that leaves the maximum dramatic impact, which Helen Mirren had done four years ago by walking down a hallway in Buckingham Palace with a five year old's confusion on her royal face.