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.
