The Lady Named X

Rating: 10/10 (14 June 2007)

Towards the end of Stephen Frears' THE QUEEN there is a scene in which Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren, at her acting finest)gets a visit from Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen, a great foil for Mirren). Two months have transpired from the events following Princess Diana's tragic death. Blair inquires if it must have been hard for her (as they take a walk which will take them out into the gardens). The look that Mirren as the Queen gives Sheen as Blair is unique -- the stuff that elevates simple acting into something truly transcendent. It's the look that conveys pages upon pages of untold, unexpressed words, the gesture which says, "You have no idea how it's been for me. Not just that awful week last year, but all my entire life."
And true to fact, neither can we. Never in the history of reigning monarchs has there ever been a less popular, more thankless person. It's as if she had devolved from being little more than a decorative figure maintaining a dying tradition, into worse than a relic, or the painting she is posing for at the opening credits. Diana, the rival, roams throughout the movie, unseen but clearly the Rebecca everyone -- variations of Mrs. Danvers, all of us, the vox populi -- rooted for and loved and expected to see carrying the ultimate Title, whereas all Elizabeth II could aspire to be less than X, blotted out, a brittle old woman with bad fashion taste frozen in the Fifties, on standby as to how she should react to Diana's death -- and this is the crux of the action. One hellish week, a battle of popularity, and a moment of indecision as to what would be the right action to take in regards to mourning The People's Princess.
A stunning movie made by a consistently remarkable director, THE QUEEN is a subtle little game of wills while it takes a darkly perverse time in skewering the monarchy, particularly in scenes involving arguments between the Queen's husband, Prince Philip (James Cromwell) and the Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms) who dissect their reactions, none too pleasant, about the rituals of mourning -- you wonder if these people actually exist and the headache it must be living with them. The feat that THE QUEEN manages to pull off is that it makes the viewer commiserate with Queen Elizabeth in the end and the fulcrum happens to be that surreal scene where she gets stranded in her own grounds and comes upon the stag her husband has been trying to hunt down. That she is, through this stag, able to finally come to terms with the fact that the world has moved on and she is in her own island is the best scene in the entire picture.