Great performance by Mirren... but a bit puzzling...

Rating: 8/10 (12 February 2007)

In this film, Helen Mirren is just plain EXCELLENT as Queen Elizabeth II, but the sense I get from her performance is that she portraits the role as realistically as possible, while her dialog is, from a psychological and emotional point of view, incongruous with her mannerisms and the events she portrays on the film. In other words, she acts one way, but her lines suggest some other course of action... I guess that the WRITING is to blame. We have no way of knowing, of course, how close Mirren's lines are to how the real queen of England behaves: if she's as arrogant, conceited, etc. as the lines Mirren reads, then the script is a triumph, but her acting gives the queen a true human perspective, a woman torn between her life-long duty and institutional stuffiness versus the aged grandmother with the truly dysfunctional family who at least should have SOME feelings, for crying out loud.
That's where the role of Tony Blair comes in to help decode the queen's. Sheen is extremely goofy as Blair at the beginning of the film, truly laughable. I perceived the movie as a comedy while sitting at a movie theater in Puerto Rico with no Spanish subtitles, and due to the subject matter people around me didn't know whether to laugh or not. I laughed and laughed hard, to the puzzled looks of everyone around me (including my wife), because the humor (particularly the exchanges between the queen and Blair) is truly clever. Helen McCrorie as Cherie Blair goes for the gut, and to me, hers and James Cromwell as the Duke of Edinburgh (as excellent as Mirren's!) are the best portrayals of the film. Sheen eventually becomes his role at the end, but the progression is slow at times; I strongly doubt that the real Blair was as a passive player of the events just before Diana's death as the movie portrays him. I see a Tony Blair that is more manufactured public servant than leader of his government.
Sylvia Sims looks too young for her part as the Queen Mum, and is her role is more comic relief than opinionated royal elder; it suits the comic intentions of the movie well, although I have no idea on just how comic the producers and director intended this movie to be. Alex Jennings nailed the Prince of Wales' voice, but he doesn't look the part (he actually looks a lot like George W. Bush in this one!), and his role wasn't as well written. He did an excellent job with the convoluted idea of the prince that was developed for the role. I suspect that the prince in real life felt a lot of second-hand guilt for his ex-wife's death, which isn't as convincing when portrayed by Jennings. I suspect that the royal princes probably played a role in their mother's events, which wasn't even a bleep on the screen on this movie. Finally, the movie was very favorable to both Blair and the queen at the end, but probably understates Blair's contribution to keep things in perspective at the house of Windsor. It is not a very flattering portrayal of the queen of England, but it is probably as real as it gets.