the drama of recent history

Rating: 8/10 (24 October 2006)

I am British and I arrived in Paris to settle here the weekend that Princess Diana died. I spent my first week watching news of the aftermath in the French press and TV. So this movie, apart from anything else, showed me the events through the British media for the first time. Like everyone else, I watched the funeral on television and was riveted by Di's brother's speech which seemed then and now to be Shakespearean in its drama, summing up the tension between her and the royal family's claim on the public's loyalty. "I come to praise Diana, not to bury her..."
Peter Watson and Stephen Frears have made an excellent movie and Helen Mirren doesn't need my endorsement for her spectacular performance. (I saw Penelope Cruz in Volver not long ago and the fight for the actress's Oscar is going to be epic this year). I was struck by the wonderful pacing of the plot and would credit the music score for a good deal of that.
My emotional engagement with the movie was unusually high. I was close to tears a lot of the time, especially towards the end. This leads me to speculate about why. I think the key is something Shakespeare and Walter Scott knew well, that the audience will be on the edge of their seats when the drama concerns events in recent history they have lived through themselves. (The best movie example of this I know is Oliver Stone's Nixon.) Society is very mysterious to us and we don't normally have access to its effects on us. But when the actors are Princess Di the most famous woman in the world, Queen Elizabeth and her dysfunctional family, Tony Blair and his power crazy New Labour henchmen (a withering portrayal of press secretary, Alistair Campbell), we see society as we lived it a decade ago personified through them and it gives us a window on ourselves.
To take one scene, the Queen returns to Buckingham Palace to find crowds of people and flowers (some with very unkind messages attached). A little girl gives her some flowers of her own and a line of women curtsy in traditional deference as she walks along. I found myself snuffling at this point. Why? I am not a monarchist, far from it. I want the whole lot out. But I have absorbed so much of British society in intangible ways and that scene showed me what I must struggle against if I want to change it.
There is no question that Queen Elizabeth is immensely reinforced by this movie. She wins, in a manner of speaking. But the future of the monarchy after she goes is uncertain. It becomes clear that she personifies the refusal of the British people to come to terms with their loss of empire and indeed lost greatness. She is the hair of the dog for their long post-imperial hangover. The British people have changed in her lifetime. They are more sentimental, less stoical than before. Maybe one day soon they will wake up from the nostalgia she represents. Maybe Blair's fall from grace, foretold by the Queen at the end of this movie, will be one catalyst for that.