The King's Speech is a movie about King George VI (Colin Firth) of England and how just before he became king and in the first years of his reign, after his brother Edward abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, he had a terrible stammer that made it basically impossible to speak to anyone, and particularly in front of large crowds.
He and his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) tried all sorts of speech therapists throughout England and have always struck out. It seems that there were a lot of quacks out there who had no problems with trying and failing to help a royal with ridiculous therapy techniques.
One day Elizabeth finds Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) an Aussie who has a very interesting psychoteraputic process to speech therapy (I think a lot of speech therapy these days is closer to this than it is to putting marbles in your mouth an enunciating or whatever). He begins treating the soon-to-be king with very unorthodox methods, like calling him his family name Bertie and asking him about his feelings of losing his father. All of their work leads up to a big speech he gives on the radio to all of his subjects around the world at the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
This is not a bad movie, but it's not much of an interesting movie at all - basically nothing happens in it. It's about a guy with a stammer who goes from a communication level of about four out of ten to a level of about seven-ish out of ten. Big fucking deal! We never really get any insight into the King, either because the writer (David Seidler) and director (Tom Hooper) didn't think it was polite to investigate a royal in such a way or maybe because not much is known of his private life (for the same reason). I guess this is a buddy movie... but it's a really top-heavy one that much more about style than substance.
Hooper uses some nice super wide angle shots to convey a level of uncomfortable intimacy, putting us in the visceral position that George is in during his therapy. This is very clever, but is basically just a gimmick. It doesn't really connect to any particular psychological drama we're seeing (unlike, say Polanski's use of wide angle shots in Repulsion, which show Catherine Deneuve going mad). There is no psycho-drama here, which is really frustrating because we are teased with it for a moment and then it's taken away.
The script is pretty terrible here and might be the worst part of the film. Most of the dialogue is ridiculous. There's a scene that's in the trailer where Logue is sitting in some special coronation chair in Westminster Abbey and George starts yelling at him to move. Logue ask him why he should and he responds, "because I have a VOICE." Ugh. What a terrible line. And it's not really like that leads to any breakthrough, as we were already told than when he yells, he doesn't stammer. On top of this, there is a collapse of the time structure where we see in one scene George's coronation and in the next his big '39 speech. Those two events were about two years apart and there was a lot of travel and speech giving in the middle - what about those years? (Also, what about Goerge's phonemic 'r' sound that he can't say? Is that just OK for English people to not be able to say hard Rs? I was confused that that was never brought up.)
The acting is getting a lot of hype here, but I thought it was just very OK. Firth does a very good impression of a man with a stammer and Rush is not as big and over-the-top as he has been in some past roles. The acting is good, but it didn't move me very much.
This whole movie didn't move me. I don't know why exactly it was made. It's not all that special a story. We don't really see what happens that leads to his breakthrough (aside from the simple practice of saying specific words and sounds). It just sits there and doesn't move much. Big deal!
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment