Good film badly marred by historical inaccuracies

Rating: 5/10 (4 February 2011)

As I expected from the trailers and from the various comments and reviews I have read the film is rather a travesty of history, and utterly misrepresents the characters and events of the time. No surprise there then, since it is rare for a commercial feature film to portray historical events with any degree of verisimilitude.
I think that Colin Firth is badly miscast as George, and though he struggles hard with the role he fails to convince chiefly because he is physically so wrong - too tall, too good-looking and altogether too commanding a physical presence. Also Helena Bonham-Carter is perhaps rather too pretty and shapely for Elizabeth. Others, too, are physically wrong for the roles they play, such as Baldwin and Churchill. Guy Pearce on the other hand is very convincing as the raffish and devil-may-care Edward (David) and in fact the believability of his portrayal tends to throw into sharper relief the "wrongness" of Firth as George, as for example, in the scene when Edward mocks and belittles him. The whole scene utterly fails to convince. Some of the other parts, however, are well played and a delight, especially Geoffrey Rush who is brilliant as Dr Logue (though I confess I have no idea what he was actually like), and it is interesting to see Ramona Marquez, so amazing in "Outnumbered" as Princess Margaret Rose.
But much more important than the miscastings, is the general tone of the film and its misrepresentations of the political and social realities of the time. Crucially of course is its depiction of attitudes towards Nazi Germany and the looming threat of war. The film credits many characters, but especially George V (a bit of a dimwit by all accounts) with extraordinary political insight and prescience. He at one point foretells and rails against Britain being squeezed, politically, between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The Royal Family are being recruited into the ranks of anti-appeasers, against all the evidence that they were generally rather non-political, and deeply conservative insofar as they were political at all. Certainly one cannot accept the idea of either George V or George VI as arch anti-appeasers. (At least this film was better, in this respect, than an ITV production I recall from a few years ago which has George, quite ludicrously and unhistorically, attacking Chamberlain's appeasement policy in conversation with Roosevelt on his American tour). The portrayal of Churchill as a supporter of George, when he was a die-hard supporter of the lost cause of Edward, is egregiously wrong. Many other things jar horribly, such as Baldwin "telling" George that Chamberlain is to succeed him as PM, rather than merely "advising" him as was of course the constitutional position. Most egregious of all the historical falsities is of course the final scene, which depicts an event which I am fairly sure never happened, namely the broadcast from Buckingham Palace to the nation on the outbreak of war. Of course it is understandable that the film-makers should need a climactic scene, for dramatic reasons, in which the "hero" overcomes the enemy, or in this case, overcomes his own weakness and inadequacy, and moreover does so in the context of using this personal triumph to rally the nation in a time of peril, for otherwise the film would just tend to trail away. But even if we are to accept this dramatic licence, I can scarcely believe that the broadcast would have happened in the way depicted, with George going out onto the balcony in front of a huge crowd of cheering people. This was horribly, crashingly, glaringly wrong. The nation was surely in a deeply sombre, despondent and apprehensive mood at this precise juncture, and no such scenes would have occurred. This was much more in keeping with the huge outpourings of celebration that occurred at the conclusion of the war, not at its commencement.