WH Auden wrote his poem "September 1, 1939" while sitting in a New York bar: "Uncertain and afraid/ As the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade." The King's Speech takes a rather different view of Britain and the 1930s, though it's not entirely inconsistent with Auden's judgment and isn't in any sense what is sneeringly called heritage cinema. It is the work of a highly talented group of artists who might be regarded as British realists – Tom Hooper directed the soccer epic The Damned United; Eve Stewart was production designer on Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake; Jenny Beavan was responsible for the costumes worn in Gosford Park andThe Remains of the Day; the cinematographer Danny Cohen lit Shane Meadows's This is England and Dead Man's Shoes; Tariq Anwar's editing credits range from The Madness of King George to American Beauty; and the screenplay is by the British writer David Seidler, who co-wrote Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream.
The film is the private story of a famous public man, King George VI (known in his family circle as Bertie), the woman who loved him and became his queen, and the innovative Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, who helped him control and come to terms with the stammer that had tortured him since childhood.
The social and political background, acutely observed and carefully woven into the film's fabric, is the Depression at home, the rise of fascism abroad, and the arrival of the mass media as a major force in our lives. Central to the dramatic action are four crucial incidents: the death in 1936 of George V, the first monarch to address his subjects via the radio; the accession to the throne of his eldest son as Edward VIII and his almost immediate abdication in order to marry American double divorcee Wallis Simpson; the crowning of his successor, George VI; and finally, in 1939, the outbreak of a war for which the king and queen became figureheads of immeasurable national significance alongside their prime minister, Winston Churchill.
Although the film involves a man overcoming a serious disability, it is neither triumphalist nor sentimental. Its themes are courage (where it comes from, how it is used), responsibility, and the necessity to place duty above personal pleasure or contentment – the subjects, in fact, of such enduringly popular movies as Casablanca and High Noon. In this sense, The King's Speech is an altogether more significant and ambitious work than Stephen Frears's admirable The Queen of 2006 and far transcends any political arguments about royalty and republicanism.
The film begins with a brief prologue in which both Bertie as Duke of York (Colin Firth) and his contemporary audience endure agonies of embarrassment as he attempts to deliver a speech at Wembley Stadium during the 1924 Empire exhibition. The rest takes place between 1934 when his wife (Helena Bonham Carter) arranges for him to see Logue the unorthodox therapist (Geoffrey Rush), and shortly after the beginning of the war when he makes a crucial live broadcast to the world from Buckingham Palace, with Logue almost conducting the speech from the other side of the microphone.
Helena Bonham Carter is a warm, charming, puckish presence as Elizabeth, very much aware of her royal status when first approaching Logue using a pseudonym. Michael Gambon is entirely convincing as George V, a peremptory man irritated by the increasing demands of democracy; having been neglected by his own father, he's incapable of expressing love for his sons. Guy Pearce is equally good as the selfish, wilful future King Edward, the movie's one truly despicable character, whose mocking of his brother's stammer places him beyond the pale. Derek Jacobi does a neat turn as Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, pillar of the establishment, at once dictatorial and obsequious.
The movie, however, ultimately turns upon the skilfully written and impeccably played scenes between Firth's Bertie, initially almost choking on his stammer but trained to insist on court protocol, and Rush's Logue, the informal, blunt-speaking Australian, whose manners are as relaxed as his consulting room in Harley Street is modest. The interplay between them resembles a version of Pygmalion or My Fair Lady in which Eliza is a princess and Henry Higgins a lower-middle-class teacher from Sydney, and they're just as funny, moving and class-conscious as in Shaw's play. There are also, one might think, benign echoes of Prince Hal and Falstaff fromHenry IV.
Across a great social gulf they become friends, the king gaining in confidence and humanity, deeply affected by the first commoner he's befriended. But to the end there remains the need to preserve a certain distance.
The film is not without its odd faults, the truly annoying one being the representation of Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall) as a supporter of George during the abdication. In fact, his intrigues in Edward VIII's cause nearly ruined his career. In his biography of Churchill, Roy Jenkins remarks that "had Churchill succeeded in keeping Edward VIII on the throne he might well have found it necessary in 1940 to depose and/or lock up his sovereign as the dangerously potential head of a Vichy-style state".
But overall the film is a major achievement, with Firth presenting us with a great profile in courage, a portrait of that recurrent figure, the stammerer as hero. He finds as many different aspects of stammering as the number of ways of photographing sand explored by Freddie Young in Lawrence of Arabia or John Seale in The English Patient. And as they did, he deserves an Oscar.
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