Now that audiences will finally have a chance to see The King's Speech, they can assess for themselves whether they can "relate" to a movie -- based on a true story -- in which a stuttering monarch works with a speech therapist to overcome his deficiency. That's a question critics, journalist-types and Oscar watchers have been pondering since the movie started gathering buzz in Toronto in September, and plenty of critics have already called the movie middlebrow. While they don't necessarily mean the word as a perjorative, their use of it does give the sense that a movie is something you examine from the safe end of a long stick, and in the case of The King's Speech, yes, by golly, the ordinary folk out there just might take to it.
But to put it plainly, The King's Speech -- directed by Tom Hooper, who made the 2009 football rouser The Damned United -- is a direct and heartfelt piece of work. It's conventional, maybe, in its sense of filmmaking decorum, but extraordinary in the way it cuts to the core of human frustration and feelings of inadequacy, reminding us how universal those feelings are. The picture's fervent mouthpiece for those ideas is Colin Firth -- in what may be the finest performance of the year -- as Albert, the second son of King George V, who would go on to become a reluctant, stammering king.
The King's Speech opens in 1925, as young Albert, Duke of York, is being forced to give a radio address before a crowd at Wembley. His father (whom we meet later, and who's played by a marvelously gruff Michael Gambon) thinks it will be good practice for the nervous young man, but he fails disastrously. The few truncated syllables he manages to squeeze out hang in the air with a tinny echo. The expression on his face is one of absolute misery and horror. His wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) looks on with pained sympathy, trying, it seems, not to express the worst thing a woman can feel for a man: pity.
Doctors treat Albert with all sorts of aggressive quackery -- "Cigarette smoking calms the nerves and gives you confidence!" says one with jaunty authority -- but nothing works, and he retreats from the public eye as much as possible. The exasperated King lectures him firmly but not cruelly, using his own 1934 Christmas address as an example of how good old public speaking ought to be done: "Easy when you know how," he says, as if trying to impress upon his terrified son that it really is no big deal.
Elizabeth takes matters into her own elegantly gloved hands and pays a discreet call on one Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a tweedy, jocular speech therapist whom she believes may be able to help her husband. She doesn't, at first, reveal herself as a royal, and Logue suggests, to her horror, that she bring her "hubby" around. Albert does meet with Logue, but only grudgingly -- and even then, he resists Logue's good-common-sense ideas for treatment and bristles at the man's familiarity. When Logue attempts to call him "Bertie," his eyes suddenly come ablaze: "Only my family uses that," he retorts sharply, though he seems to be protecting his private self rather than rebuking a commoner for his bad manners.
Then again, even when he finally begins accepting Logue's help, he never lets his "doctor" (as it turns out, Logue's credentials are something of a question mark) forget the difference in their stations. The prickliness of their friendship, marked both by Logue's desire to help and Albert's resistance in accepting that help, gives the movie its emotional texture, and the men's push-me-pull-you exchanges help give the movie its shape.
The script is by David Seidler, whose credits include the 1988 Tucker: The Man and His Dream, and who was himself, he told the L.A. Times, "quite a profound stutterer" as a child. It would be very easy to frame The King's Speech as a simple triumph-over-adversity story, particularly considering that the movie's penultimate moment is the one in which Albert, having recently been crowned George VI, successfully addresses his subjects with deeply troubling news: That England is going to war. But there are so many layers and angles to The King's Speech -- funny ones as well as wrenching ones -- that it would be a mistake to dismiss it, with a pat on the head, as a facile crowd pleaser. When Albert finally gives that terrible, necessary speech, the moment is less about his personal triumph than about the corridor that has suddenly opened between him and the rest of the world. It's not a case of one guy's overcoming his speech problem trumping a burgeoning world crisis; it's a case of a man finally realizing that he has all the tools to fight that crisis. Finally, he's able to reach his people, and it doesn't happen a minute too soon.
And then there's the pleasure of watching so many performers, in roles big and small, pour the best of what they've got into this particular vessel. Timothy Spall is an affable, astute Winston Churchill; Guy Pearce shows up as a sympathetic -- at least at first -- Edward VIII, the man whose abdication of the throne would toss poor Albert right onto it. Bonham Carter makes a believably warm, if proper, Elizabeth, and the movie's costumers (led by Jenny Beavan) have done right by her: She's shown in a series of tilted saucer-shaped hats, the very kind the real-life Elizabeth -- a.k.a. the Queen Mum -- would favor until her death in 2002, at age 101.
Rush, as the roguish Logue, is the good Geoffrey Rush, more akin to the wily actor we saw in Quills than the mannered, overreaching one of Shine. He's stern with his royal patient -- "My house, my rules!" he barks when Albert tries to light up a cigarette in his presence -- but he seems to be motivated mostly by the drive to diminish this man's suffering. When he coaches the king through that crucial radio speech, we see that he's marked the typewritten text with slashes and beats, a roadmap for the jittery king to follow. Rush's whole performance is like that: His character recognizes the value of a businesslike -- though not perfunctory -- act of kindness.
Albert's response to that kindness, as Firth plays it, is understandably awkward. That's because Firth recognizes his character as a man who's both bound by duty and embarrassed by it. The first time we see Firth's Albert step up to a microphone, it's nearly unbearable to watch his face: The stress and anxiety we see there is so vivid, it makes him look both painfully boyish and aged beyond his years. When he comes to Logue's office, he arranges himself uncomfortably on a shabby settee, his shoulders hunching their way toward his ears. And for a serious public appearance in 1936, after his brother's abdication, Albert is forced to don what can only be described as a "King suit," a dress uniform complete with gilt epaulettes at the shoulders and a weighty sword clanging at his side. Firth makes us feel every ounce of the weight he's bearing.
It's always easiest to assess a performance by thinking about an actor's line delivery, but of course, so much of acting (if not most of it) actually happens between the lines. As you can imagine, there's a lot of between-the-lines in The King's Speech: When Albert stammers, a look of angry determination tends to cross his face -- he'll get that word out, or else. But force, not even self-inflicted force, doesn't work. Firth's performance here is both meticulously controlled and miraculously, blissfully open: He shows us infinite gradations of suffering, but we also eventually see his joyful relief, too.
One of the movie's loveliest sequences is something of a filip, a scene in which Albert and Elizabeth spend some time in the nursery with their two young daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth. The little-girl princesses are dressed for bed in their nighties and hair-ribbons. Each of them hugs a patient, panting corgi, and they giggle as their father, dressed in his evening clothes, tells them -- with a notable lack of stuttering -- a cheerfully self-deprecating story about a prince who's been turned into a penguin.
It's a charming little slice-of-life scene. (Cinematographer Danny Cohen is terrific at bringing us into the intimate spaces of these very private people.) It's so charming that we're likely to wonder: Is it realistic?
Do we care if it isn't? We know this is a true story that has been folded, trimmed and wedged into a piece of dramatic fiction. But strict veracity aside, it's such a relief, and a pleasure, to care about people and things we see in a movie. The real strength of The King's Speech is that it allows us to care deeply about those little princesses and their parents in movie terms, rather than in real-life ones. And that's our job when we go to the movies.