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This movie is like a beautifully wrapped Christmas gift. “The King’s Speech� is absorbing, tasteful, uplifting, gorgeously made and superlatively acted, and it draws its audiences through the world of regal privilege and forbidding aloneness into a story of the human need to communicate, to speak and be understood, and — ultimately — to have a friend.
Britain’s Duke of York (Colin Firth) stutters badly at home and especially in public appearances. Shy, frightened of his father and bullied growing up, he has visited speech experts and speech quacks to no avail.
His wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) seeks help from Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian speech therapist who employs unusual methods: He will treat Bertie only in his own, drab home, insists on first names, makes the duke exercise, sing and shout obscenities to relax him. (The last provoked the Motion Picture Association ratings board — prigs all — to award the film an R rating. For God’s sake.)
Lionel believes stutterers are made not born, that the cause lies in the psyche and must be released.
Once Bertie, as the duke is called by his family, meets Lionel, the film becomes a fascinating duel between the repressed Bertie and the cheerful, relaxed and confident Lionel. Here the film leaves the public stage and grows intensely personal as Bertie inches toward realizing that Lionel is the first real friend he has ever had, and that he can trust him. But the real world intrudes: Bertie’s brother David (King Edward VIII) abdicates to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, and Bertie (as King George VI) is shoved onto the throne of a country about to go to war with Hitler, a country which will need to hear from its king often.
Will Bertie be able to broadcast his declaration-of-war speech successfully? While the answer is never in doubt, it’s still an inspiring, tear-jerking finale, complete with Beethoven in the background.
What lifts “The King’s Speech� above the usual Masterpiece Theater historical drama are the performances: Firth, who should be a shoo-in for an Academy Award, is stunning. With amazing restraint and control, he manages to convey tenderness, aloofness, royal superiority, anguish, and fear with the tiniest movement of eyes and facial muscles; need in subtle changes of voice; resignation in slight shifts in posture. He gives little to the camera, but what he gives says all.
Rush is equally good, if not as restrained. Yet he, too, can convey joy or sorrow, excitement or disappointment with minimal effort. His gentle face invites trust. Bonham Carter hasn’t been this fine since “A Room with a View� and “The Wings of the Dove.� Here she is funny and cheeky. (When asked by Lionel’s wife what to call her, she responds, “First your majesty, then ma’am as in ham, not ma’am as in palm.�)
Other performances are not so successful. Guy Pearce makes a terrible, overly wimpy David, and Timothy Spall impersonates Alfred Hitchcock rather than Winston Churchill. But Derek Jacobi, who played that famous historical stutterer, Roman Emperor Claudius, in “I, Claudius,� is amusingly cast as the self righteous Archbishop of Canterbury, while Anthony Andrews — effete and languorous in “Brideshead Revisited� — is Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, a paragon of English rectitude.
Tom Hooper, the young English director who won an Emmy for the enthralling HBO “Adams Chronicles,� has directed in a careful, detailed way. Just watch Elizabeth’s car slowly plow through a thick London fog led by an attendant on foot and you feel the scene as much as watch it.
While he has eccentricities — closeups are usually placed to the side of a frame, seldom in the center — he is obviously an actor-oriented director who can pull wonderful performances from his cast.
David Seidler’s script is full of accurate, historical observation (the princesses hobby horses, King George V’s clocks always set 30 minutes fast to ensure against tardiness) and imagined, yet movingly real scenes between Bertie and Lionel.
“The King’s Speech� is classy and moving. It is old-fashioned yet timely: overcoming physical impediment, confronting new technology (the new and influential wireless radio), seeking human contact and relationships. Not so different from our world of the Web, Facebook and smart phones.
The film is rated R for language, which is too silly to discuss since it would involve a whole discourse on American puritanism and fear of words.
Ignore it: your kids will see no film more wholesome and edifying all year.
It is at the Triplex in Great Barrington, MA, and will open at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, Jan. 14.
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Telecom Reg’s Best Kept On the Books
When Connecticut land-use commissions update their regulations, it seems like a no-brainer to jettison old telecommunications regulations adopted decades ago during a short-lived period when municipalities had authority to regulate second generation (2G) transmissions prior to the Connecticut Siting Council (CSC) being ordered by a state court in 2000 to regulate all cell tower infrastructure as “functionally equivalent” services.
It is far better to update those regs instead, especially for macro-towers given new technologies like small cells. Even though only ‘advisory’ to the CSC, the preferences of towns by law must be taken into consideration in CSC decision making. Detailed telecom regs – not just a general wish list -- are evidence that a town has put considerable thought into where they prefer such infrastructure be sited without prohibiting service that many – though not all – citizens want and that first responders rely on for public safety.
Such regs come in handy when egregious tower sites are proposed in sensitive areas, typically on private land. The regs are a town’s first line of defense, especially when cross referenced to plans of conservation and development, P&Z regulations, and wetlands setbacks. They identify how/where the town plans to intersect with the CSC process. They are also a roadmap for service providers regarding preferred sites and sometimes less neighborhood contention. In fact, to have no telecom regs can weaken a town’s rights to protect environmental, scenic, and historic assets, and serve up whole neighborhoods to unnecessary overlapping coverage and corporate overreach. Such regs are unique to every town and should not follow anyone else’s boiler plate, especially industry’s.
Connecticut is the only state that has a centralized siting entity for cell towers. The good news is that applicants must prove need for new tower sites in an evidentiary proceeding and any decisions have the weight of the state behind them. The bad news is that the CSC used to be far less industry-friendly and rote in their reviews, which now resemble a check list. There is an operative assumption at CSC that if an applicant wants a tower, they must need it, otherwise why spend significant money to run the approval gauntlet? This reflects a subtle shift over the years at CSC from sincere willingness to protect the environment toward minimal tweaking of bad applications with minor changes. The bottom line is that towns really cannot rely on the CSC to do all the work for them.
What CSC issues telecom providers is a “certificate of environmental compatibility” after an evidentiary proceeding (not unlike a court case) with intervenors, parties, expert witnesses, and the service provider’s technical pro’s sworn in and subject to cross examination. Service providers get to do the same with any opposition from intervenor/party participants – like towns and citizens -- and their experts. It’s an impressive process whose ultimate goal is the fine balancing between allowing adequate/reliable public services and protecting state ecology with minimal damage to scenic, historic, and recreational values. They unfortunately often fall short of their mandate – like approving cell towers with diesel generators over town aquifers -- evidenced by CSC only rejecting about five cell towers in the past 15-20 years.
The CSC was founded in 1972 and clarified its mission in the 1980’s to prevent the state from being carved up willy-nilly by gas pipelines, high tension corridors, and broadcast towers. With the sudden proliferation of cell towers beginning in late 1990’s, it became the most sued agency in Connecticut by both an arrogant upstart industry if applications were denied and by towns/citizens when bad sites were forced on them. CSC gradually formed a defensive posture that drives their decisions toward industry with deeper pockets and attorneys on retainer.
For citizens, nothing can wreck one’s day like the CSC. It behooves towns to protect what little toolkit they have, and understand the legal parameters of the CSC’s playing field. The CSC is not a “normal” government agency where municipal/citizen redress is based on logic and local support. Their process is largely immune to everything but specific kinds of evidence – like town regs with setbacks/fall zones, radio frequency transmission signal strengths, sensitive areas identified, and detailed wildlife inventory, among others.
There is a current cell tower fight involving two intervening towns -- Washington and Warren; both with good cell tower regs – over a tower site within 1200’ of a Montessori School, near Steep Rock’s nature preserves with comprehensive geology/wildlife databases that include endangered, threatened and special concern flora and fauna, on established federal/state migratory bird flyways, within throwing distance to a historic site capable of being listed on the Underground Railroad, and with an access road on a blind curve entering a state highway that will permanently damage wetlands, vernal pools, and core forests. There are well credentialed environmental experts, including Dr. Michael Klemens, former chair of Salisbury’s P&Z, as well as the former director of migratory bird management at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and an RF engineer testifying to alternative approaches, plus three attorneys representing intervenors. It is the most professional challenge I have seen at CSC since Falls Village successfully mounted one that protected Robbins Swamps several years ago.
The hearing is ongoing, with uncertain results. To see what it takes today to stop an inappropriate tower siting, see Docket #543 under “Pending Matters” at https://portal.ct.gov/csc before removing local cell tower regs – the lowest hanging fruit that any town can possess in case it’s needed.
B, Blake Levitt is the Communications Director at The Berkshire-Litchfield Environmental Council. She writes about how technology affects biology.