Dir: Tom Hooper; starring: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter. 12a cert, 118 min. Rating: * * * *
At first, The King’s Speech, directed by Tom Hooper, looks awfully familiar, a musty historical drama full of monarchs and period costumes and atmospheric fog. Peer a bit closer though, and it’s a thoroughly modern tale, the true-life story of a king’s efforts to overcome his stammer in order to face his public, constructed like a contemporary makeover narrative.
The chap in need of help is Albert, Duke of York (Colin Firth). For as long as anyone can remember he’s had difficulties enunciating. His father, King George V (Michael Gambon), is an emotional despot who mistakes chiding for medicine. Real doctors are of little help either: they stuff Albert’s mouth with marbles and tell him that smoking will relax his lungs.
Nothing seems to work. Albert struggles even to tell bedtime stories to his children. He mooches around as if he’s seen the future: it’s grey. The top hat he sports at social functions appears to droop like a wilted flower. He sinks to new sloughs of despond after he delivers a speech at the 1925 British Empire Exhibition; it’s so nervous and jolting it can’t help but, to our ears, prefigure the end of empire.
In desperation, Albert and his wife (Helena Bonham Carter) seek help from an unlikely source: an unsuccessful Australian actor named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who is working in London as a speech therapist. To say they don’t get on is an understatement. One is a commoner, the other a future monarch. One comes from Down Under, the other is accustomed to looking down at people as they bow before him.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8244121/The-Kings-Speech-review.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8244121/The-Kings-Speech-review.html
