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Directed by Stephen Frears; written by
Peter Morgan; director of photography, Affonso Beato; edited by Lucia
Zucchetti; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Alan
Macdonald; produced by Christine Langan, Tracey Seaward and Andy
Harries; released by Miramax Films.
103 minutes. Rated
PG-13 for some harsh language.
STARRING:
Helen Mirren (the Queen), Michael Sheen (Tony Blair), James Cromwell
(Prince Philip), Sylvia Syms (the Queen Mother), Alex Jennings (Prince
Charles), Helen McCrory (Cherie Blair), Roger Allam (Sir Robin Janvrin)
and Tim McMullan (Stephen Lamport).
When Diana, Princess of Wales,
died after a car crash in
Paris in 1997, people from around the world
who had been enthralled by Diana's dramatic story went into a state of
shock. Like birth and true love, death is one of those unspeakable
mysteries that cause human beings to respond with creative expressions
that manifest some measure of their response. And once they recovered
from their initial bewilderment, people poured out their grief in an
expressions of music, poetry, and, yes... flowers.
So many flowers were brought to
the gates of Kensington Palace that they
looked like a flood of grief pouring up the
avenue.
And they symbolized more than the broken hearts of Diana’s countless
fans. The waves of that flood surged against the gates like some kind of
apocalyptic judgment against the Royal Family, a
rising tide threatening to swamp and even submerge the monarchy
for good.
An expression such as this
demands a response. But the response they desired did not come from the
palace. Where was the Queen?
Why weren’t the royals giving emotional public tributes to the woman
Blair called “The People’s Princess”? Why couldn’t the cameras get
inside that palace to give us the scoop? Where was the drama we
demanded?
And why wasn’t the flag above Buckingham Palace
flying at half-mast?
As the doors remains shut, the
people turned instead to their newly
elected Labor prime minister
Tony Blair, who had just won the election by a landslide.
There he
was, in front of the cameras, responding with eloquence and emotion. He
gave voice to the people’s feelings. They felt suddenly and unexpectedly
united by his summations of their sadness.
And still the palace was silent.
This eventually stirred up rumors, and anger, and eventually the kind of
resentment that can boil over into violent action.
Stephen Frears’ film The Queen takes us into
the middle of this chaos. And the result goes
a long way toward answering the question of the royal
family's silence,
helping us to understand why Queen Elizabeth II
failed to respond for so many days. Some may even come to agree with the way that
the Queen handled Diana’s death. While Frears’ film is hardly a
whitewashing of the walls of the House of Windsor — he lays the faults
of the royal family bare for all to see — he does help us begin to grasp
the reasoning behind the restraint, and the purpose of keeping certain
things private rather than parading them out at the whims
of the public.
* * *
The film begins just before that
catastrophic car crash, seemingly provoked by pursuing paparazzi, took
the lives of the Princess of Wales
and her boyfriend, the rich playboy Dodi Fayed.
With an efficient and effective montage of
news clips, Frears reminds
us (as if we could forget) just how
popular Diana had become, and why.
Unlike Queen Elizabeth, who
stuck to the typical rituals of her tradition, Diana was an adventurous
do-gooder. She was as big as Paris Hilton, and much more
charitable and generous. She fought for
AIDS awareness. She spoke up when her people wanted
to hear from her. The world was charmed by the way her wedding to
Prince Charles resembled a fairy tale. And people were overjoyed to see
a "commoner" like themselves, a schoolteacher, a
local beauty, enter into such glory with pomp and extravagance. The
formality of it all was thrilling.
But eventually, she became
symbolic of something else. When the extramarital affair of her husband
Charles became public, and all of that symbolic expression was proven
empty and corrupt, Charles showed no signs of repentance or remorse. And
thus Diana came to represent another aspect of being "ordinary" in
Britan--the establishment had made a show of their honor and devotion to
her, and then betrayed her.
And so she set out looking for love, as her marriage was “a bit
crowded.” With her went the
hearts of masses of Brits, looking for some other symbolic fulfillment
in globe-hopping affairs. Diana became vigorously "modern."
She became, as Tony Blair named
her in a speech, "the People's Princess." And by implication, the rest
of the royals were no longer of the people, but of a bygone era.
So, when Diana's death sent the
outraged public hunting for scapegoats, and the royals would not
come down and weep and participate in the wild circus of public
mourning, it was inevitable that the crown would
become the target of a nation's rage.
*
* *
Frears finds this conflict to be
the heated core of many cultural tensions, and by focusing on the figure
hidden behind the palace walls, he ends up revealing much not only about
the scandal but about a continental shift in British history.
He takes us inside, where we learn that the
royals really weren’t so devastated over the loss, except insofar
as they had to comfort two boys who had lost
their mother. To make a big emotional speech? That would have been dishonest,
and worse (in their estimation), inappropriate.
The Queen and her husband had been bothered by Diana,
for she was so foreign to their legacy and traditions
and sense of propriety. Diana made public
things that they, in their embarrassment and shame, wanted to keep
private. all of the matters
within the palace a public affair. While they had been troubled by
Charles’ infidelity, they hadn’t considered it their responsibility to
deal with such family affairs on the public stage.
Still, it’s clear that they were partly to blame
for the disaster. The royals proved themselves capable of covering up and
ignoring their sins much the way the U.S. government is
capable of covering up or downplaying the crimes of its own
officials, or the way the church tends to be quick to
absolve its own priests and pastors. The Queen
isn’t a celebration and
exoneration of the Royal Family —
it portrays them as self-interested and avoiding any question of
what sparked this crisis in the first place: Charles'
deception and infidelity.
We watch as the Queen, who has always been bothered
by Diana’s popularity, bristles as her son's dirty
laundry is hung out on the front lawn for all to see. The
customs she carries on have lived for many generations;
so she assumes, as does her blunt, bitter, temperamental husband Prince
Phillip, that this public hysteria is just a phase that will pass in a
few days.
But it doesn’t. No, the world really has changed.
And it’s going to take Elizabeth a while to absorb
the truth that the monarchy is not very well respected or understood any
longer. When she wakes up to learn about the tragedy, it’s as if she’s
waking up to a whole new era. The slow march of progress has gone on too
gradually for the reality of it to sink into the royals heads and
hearts.
*
* *
Frears' film might have served merely to show the
breakdown of the family as they absorb the
discovery of their own declining importance. But instead, it serves to
quietly and carefully awaken us to what it has cost Britain to shove
this institution aside in the name of “modernization.”
We experience this awakening through the slow but
admirable wizening of Tony Blair, who is played with impressive accuracy
and intelligence by Michael Sheen.
When Charles (played by Alex Jennings, who does
not resemble the Prince of Wales at all) returns Diana’s body to
England, the queen slips away from the media circus and goes to Balmoral,
hoping the whole thing will blow over.
Meanwhile, Blair does the dutiful thing in
responding to the people and representing them, giving their grief an
eloquent voice. And his popularity skyrockets. He might have let that
heroism go to his head, and called for reform that would have toppled
the monarchy and robbed it of any relevance at all.
But he did not. And the film portrays him as
beginning to understand that this is not merely obstinance he faces. Early in the film, we see him rolling his eyes at
the royal family. “Will someone please save these people from
themselves?” he asks, exasperated. And his wife, Cherie Blair (Helen
McCrory), writes off the royal family as a
bunch of "freeloading, emotionally retarded nutters."
But Blair isn’t willing to write the family off. He can see their
naiveté and corruption, but he doesn’t want to throw the baby out with
the bathwater.
It is, he begins to understand,
the burden of a legacy weighing on Elizabeth’s shoulders. If she
concedes to his requests to grant the people's demand
for a speech and a public funeral, she betrays the tradition, and
she shows that the crown is vulnerable to arrows
fired from the spiteful kingdom of gossip. She refuses to
surrender herself to acting at the whims of an impulsive and demanding
people. But if she does not, the people may turn against the royal
family and all of their history in contempt.
Some critics are saying the film portrays Blair as
an opportunist, seizing the day to advance his own popularity. But in
this film, I see more than that: I see a man who,
like Diana, is impulsive, emotional, and intuitive. But more than that,
he's also patient, willing to consider other perspectives... other
cultures, in fact. He bristles when others suggest he’s merely
playing a smart game. He becomes a sort of
translator, justifying the ways of the monarchy to a disgruntled people,
even as he tries to coax the Queen toward a sacrificial act in the name
of reconciliation.
* * *
If the film has a weakness, it is not the way it
makes a sympathetic hero of Blair. It is instead the way it gives little
thought to one of the primary causes of the crisis. The monarch’s crime
was not, as the people decided, an unwillingness to break their own
rules and put on some elaborate charade. It was their willingness to
cover up and give sanction to the prince in his infidelity in the first
place. It was their silence, and thus their consent, to the betrayal of
the symbol of marriage... marriage between husband
and wife before God, and between the royalty and their public
Title and authority places upon a
person more than the usual weight of personal responsibility
— it places
upon them the burden of leadership, and of preserving the meaning of
symbol and ritual. When a king or a prince betrays his wife,
or a president deceives his nation, he
communicates to the nation that he lacks integrity and restraint and
self-control; but worse,
it communicates that he has no respect for the covenant of
that marriage, or
the value of a promise.
In protecting Charles and
behaving as if it was Diana's responsibility to just tough out the
affair, the royal family
condemned themselves. This issue goes all but overlooked in the film.
But
then agian, this is not a movie
about Charles' unfaithfulness to Diana. It’s a film about the Queen's
faithfulness to history, and to fulfill the vows she took.
Thus, when Elizabeth’s crisis point comes, it is
not a breakdown over the death of Diana. It is instead a moment of
surrender to the weight of her responsibility, after doing what she can
to hold together what's left of her legacy.
Her heart is broken with the help of a beautiful elk
— a fourteen-point buck who inspires
the local hunters. He comes to represent the beauty and elegance of
Elizabeth's tradition, and it is shocking to
see the utter disregard that some people, like
hunters with rifles or tabloid reporters armed with microphones, can have for such regal
grace and beauty.
* * *
Overall, the film is powerfully eloquent about the
weaknesses of the monarchy's traditions, and even more eloquent about
what we are losing as cultural trends slowly push that institution
aside.
The last shot of the film is perfectly chosen. And I couldn't
help but wonder if it offers a wry comment on the change: The queen and
her Prime Minister are walking through the manicured garden, staying on
the prescribed path, and who is it that runs roughshod across the
grounds, disregarding these lines and ignoring the classical fountain
and statues? The dogs.
Judging from the way many of the viewers around me
yipped, snapped, and yelped at every opportunity to mock the queen and
the monarchy, it’s clear that the dogs will continue to have their day.
* * *
While the film is about an historic British monarch
on one level, it is, on another, about the reigning queen of British
screen acting.
As she has proved again and again
— especially in Robert Altman’s
Gosford Park —
Helen Mirren is a masterful actor. She can communicate with a quiver of
her brow or the slightest tilt of her head more eloquently than most
actresses can with a whole emotional speech. She has proven this again
and again, reminding us that there is no substitute for craft and
control.
In The Queen, it is precisely her craft and
control that make her performance so powerful. If she wins the Academy
Award this year —
and she’s unlikely to have any serious challengers
— it will be a lesson to those who
think that scenes of emotional breakdowns or zealous speeches are the
best opportunities an actress can hope for.
In this role, it is
Mirren’s task to put on a mask that has hardened through centuries of
tradition, manner, and duty. And her triumph is that she is able to
convey a world of complex emotions through that mask. While the others
around her burst with emotion, her quiet resilience slowly becomes a
show of strength that demands respect. It is her restraint rather than
hysteria, her quiet rather than a boisterous speech, and her effortless
poise rather than grandstanding, that shake the house.
This performance is especially resonant because it
reinforces the central lesson of The Queen. Mirren’s approach to
acting is classical, formal, thorough, and subtle. It comes from a
lifetime of practice, and her dedication to doing everything the way it
should be done gives her integrity and strength.
Based on the honors it usually hands out, Hollywood
would have us believe that greatness lies in mere
audacity, in the willingness to perform daring sex scenes or to burst
into geysers of tears on cue. Mirren’s performances are
not exhibitionism... they are slow-burn revelations
that will stand the test of time.
And thus, it is a perfect bit of casting to have
her play Elizabeth. For, like the Queen, she may be old-fashioned, but
she understands the power and the purpose of restraint.
Here’s hoping that the Academy recognizes such
exceptional work, and gets it right this time.
Perhaps they’ll even decide to honor the director
as well.
There aren’t many directors capable of doing what
Steven Frears has done so far in his career. Think back on his wide
array of notable, memorable films, which have spanned so many different
subjects in strikingly different contexts, genres, and styles. From
sumptuous period pieces like Dangerous Liaisons and Mary
Reilly to the hip crime caper The Grifters, small-scale
comedies like The Snapper and The Van, troubling thrillers
like Dirty Pretty Things, and hip comedies like High Fidelity,
he’s one of the most versatile directors working today.
And this is one of his finest. |
