The top slice of life

Rating: 8/10 (8 May 2007)

Some events seem retrospectively less significant than they did at the time: the death of Princess Diana is one of these. So in a sense, there's little real purpose to Stephen Frears' film 'The Queen'. But it is great fun to see a collection of the great and the good, royals and politicians alike, portrayed exactly as we might imagine them to be. For example, a youthful Tony Blair features, exactly as he was before office and war wore him down; and likewise, everyone else is depicted in a way that seems utterly convincing, but never surprising. Watching this is almost like viewing a soap opera, where the pleasure comes from watching everyone perform to type. Helen Mirren is particularly good in the title role, and it's a tribute to her acting skills that she seems completely in character, and makes the role wholly different from her previous portrayal of Elizabeth the first. Overall, it's hardly a groundbreaking work; but Frears has made a career of depicting odd slices of England, and he seems to enjoy looking over the highest strata in the land with his offbeat eye. If you know anything about the events depicted, you'll probably enjoy it as well.