The Queen

Stephen Frears, UK / France / Italy, 2006
3.5 out of 4 stars

I may have some Anglophile tendencies, but I tend to draw the line at the contemporary monarchy, which is why I had to be convinced by the recommendations of at least three friends that this was something that I should see (and not just another celebration of middlebrow mediocrity on the part of the Academy). It has also been implied, at least by one of my professors, that a woman of intelligence such as Helen Mirren is giving the supposedly dim Elizabeth II too much credit by playing her in the first place.

The truth is, I don’t know anything about the British monarch, and I suspect that I don’t know that much more about her after having seen this film. Perhaps in part due to an interview I read with the director, I didn’t feel, despite the television footage that is peppered throughout (these segments serve to give some context, and are crucial considering how much of the purported discontent was being conveyed through news media), that I was meant to take the depictions at face value. This is not a docudrama, as will probably be clear from the fact that most of the attention has been given to Mirren’s performance.

Instead, Mirren’s queen and Michael Sheen’s Prime Minister (I was told ahead of time that his performance was also quite good, and that person was right in saying so) portray real, living people with a fine level of verisimilitude and imitation, while also performing obvious and yet fascinating roles as emblems of different trends in modern British society. I do think that there are times at which this thread threatens to become too didactic, as I didn’t appreciate the queen and her aide explaining to each other what Blair’s politics were at the beginning (meaning that any viewer with some knowledge of the subject matter must have felt this way at some point in the film). But even though the conflict of values would seem to lend itself to broad strokes, the script and the actors combine to make it a surprisingly successful sort of parable. Finally, I have no investment in Princess Diana whatsoever, so it’s particularly impressive that I could be this involved in a film that is concerned entirely with events surrounding the aftermath of her death.

Source: Buena Vista 35mm print
3 February, 7:25 PM