The King’s Speech is a joy, and I adore it.
The King’s Speech is a joy, and I adore it. In fact, I love it so much that, if I could, I would take it home and put it down for a good school and wrap it up warm in the cold and, should it catch a chill, I would nurse it and offer hot lemon and maybe even oxtail soup, which is actually quite disgusting, but always appealing when you are sickly, for some reason. Yes, it’s a full-blown heritage crowd-pleaser and, yes, the banter between the king and his speech therapist is too snappily arch to be even remotely naturalistic and, yes, it probably is too enamoured of its royal characters, but you know what? I don’t care. And should you ever raise such matters again, I will take that ox tail out of the soup and whip you about the face with it. Good; I think we all know where we stand now.
The film is based on the true but little-known story of George VI (Colin Firth), his profoundly debilitating stammer, and Leonard ‘Lionel’ Logue (Geoffrey Rush), the speech therapist who helped him and became his friend, perhaps his only friend. If Alan Bennett and Peter Morgan were to ever, say, go on a mini-break to a country-house hotel, this is, I imagine, just the sort of film they would come back with, along with the Molton Brown toiletries from the bathroom, and possibly the dressing-gowns. (They both seem the type.) As it is, it’s directed by Tom Hooper (who directed Morgan’s The Damned United) but written by David Seidler, a screenwriter who was a stutterer in his youth, and had long wished to put this story on screen.
Some years ago, he contacted Logue’s surviving son, who said he would co-operate and share his father’s diaries, but only if Seidler got written permission from the Queen Mum, which he did not. ‘Please, not in my lifetime,’ the Queen Mother wrote to him. ‘The memory of those events is still too painful.’ So he had to wait. I like to think the Queen Mother spoke out of protectiveness rather than embarrassment. I like to think this because even I feel madly protective of dear, dear Bertie now.
The film opens when Bertie, as he was known by his family, is still the Duke of York, has no expectation of becoming king, and appears ill-equipped to become king. Attempting to deliver a public speech, his eyes dart with fear while the words stick in his throat and agonisingly stay there. His adoringly protective and determined wife Elizabeth (aka the Queen Mum, played by Helena Bonham Carter) seeks out speech therapists with disastrous results — one advises smoking and stuffs marbles into Bertie’s mouth until he retches — but then hits upon Logue, an Australian who lives in a peculiarly wallpapered, underfurnished flat and is, indeed, unorthodox. He insists Bertie comes to him for treatment. He insists they use first names.
Bertie and Lionel banter, row, find common ground, quarrel bitterly, laugh, share a drink, step over the mark, break off all contact, resume contact, see off the gimlet-eyed Archbishop of Canterbury (Derek Jacobi) and layer by layer, inch by inch, slowly reveal themselves to each other. Having been derided and bullied by both his father (Michael Gambon) and his more charismatic, playboy older brother Edward (Guy Pearce) Bertie has never had any reason to think much of himself.
Meanwhile, Logue, a failed actor with no proper elocution qualifications, has his own demons. Rush is energetically winning while Firth’s portrayal of Bertie is so powerfully warm and sympathetic that if he doesn’t clean up at the Oscars I will eat my hat, and once I have eaten my hat I will pop round to you and eat yours. (I can manage two hats in one evening; I am quite greedy when it comes to hats, and rarely full.)
As the film moves through Edward’s abdication and builds up most suspensefully to Bertie’s first wartime speech as king, it is sometimes comic — there is a marvellous scene involving vigorous profanities — sometimes touching, always elegant and never oversentimental. Bertie’s emotional thawing is never too cute or pat.
Meanwhile, the period details are heavenly while the blissful supporting cast includes Claire Bloom, Anthony Andrews, Jennifer Ehle and, as little Princess Margaret, Ramona Marquez, that terrific kid from Outnumbered. The only bum note is, unusually, Timothy Spall’s performance as Winston Churchill, largely because he appears to be channelling Peter Hitchens. (Why would anyone want to do that? I’m sure even Peter Hitchens does not much like channelling Peter Hitchens. Weird.)
This is a warmly enjoyable, engaging film which I recommend to you whole-heartedly, and, if I had an extra heart, I would recommend it to you two-heartedly. Higher praise than this I cannot give. Soup, yes. I can always give soup. But higher praise? I’m all out of it now.
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