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The King’s Speech
By Lorraine LoBianco
Stars: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter
Director: Tom Hooper
My faith in films and their audience was restored last night by both “The King’s Speech” (quite simply the best film I’ve seen in years) and the Arclight Theater at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood (an altogether different cinema experience, as I’ll explain later). 
The title “The King’s Speech” refers not just to The Duke of York (later King George VI)’s bad stammer, but to the climatic radio speech that he must make when England enters World War II in 1939. Since the medium of radio was relatively new, it was the most important broadcast made by a British monarch up to that time. For the King, his speech must rally the British people and at the same time it will determine how he is viewed by his subjects in the years to come. It would be a daunting task for any man, but for a man with a debilitating stammer, made worse by stress, it seemed impossible.
There is a lot of Oscar™ buzz about “The King’s Speech” and with good reason. Both Colin Firth (a shoo-in for Best Actor or the Academy Awards have zero credibility) as the Duke of York and Geoffrey Rush as his speech therapist Lionel Logue (likely to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor) give outstanding performances.
The brilliance of Firth’s portrayal is revealed in the scene in which he must make his first radio broadcast with a speech at a huge arena, despite the stammer. We see him walking up the stairs flanked by men in black suits, his wife, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang (the always wonderful Derek Jacobi). Director Tom Hooper has staged it to look exactly like a man mounting the scaffold to be executed and that is exactly the terror that Firth expresses using just his eyes and body language. He is very much like a man about to die. In the language of actors, he does “die.” The speech is a disaster. Bertie (as the Duke is known to his family) can barely utter a sound.
Cut to 1934 and a discussion between Bertie and his father King George V (Michael Gambon). The King is worried about the future of the Royal Family. Bertie’s older brother, David (Guy Pearce), is next in line to the throne. A playboy of the first order, he has fallen in love with and wants to marry a twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson (Eve Best), who is rumored to have once worked in a brothel. As the King of England is also head of the Anglican Church and at the time a divorced person could not enter the church, it is impossible for David to marry her, despite the near-hypnotic spell she seems to have cast over him. King George sees the future clearly. He predicts that David will destroy the monarchy and probably the country within 12 months of being crowned, not only for his love of Wallis Simpson but his cozying up to Adolf Hitler, who the King recognizes as a serious threat. It will be up to Bertie, as the next King, to put the country back together. To do that, he tells his son, he must conquer his stammer. Every inch a man of his time, George’s way of dealing with his son’s stammer as a child was to bully him and to encourage his older brother’s taunts. It only made things worse. As an adult, he is still bullied and taunted and things predictably go downhill.
Enter the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue who seeks to unearth the secrets that Bertie desperately tries to conceal. Bertie may be a King in the making, but Logue is every bit as much a King in his own “castle”. He insists that Bertie come to him in his Harley Street office (“my castle, my rules”) and use first names instead of titles. Bertie protests Logue’s lack of decorum and his unorthodox methods. Logue doesn’t just treat the physical but the psychological problem. At first the Duke and his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter, who seems to have been born to play in period dramas) insist that they leave all personal feelings out of it, but over time that rule is forgotten and as he improves his stammer, the Duke gives Logue (and the audience) brief glimpses into what his life has been. More than once, what he reveals is heart-breaking.
The cast also includes Anthony Andrews as Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Claire Bloom as Queen Mary and Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill. For American audiences, Colin Firth is perhaps best known for the BBC production of “Pride and Prejudice”, in which he played Mr. Darcy. Two of his “Pride and Prejudice” costars appear in the film: Jennifer Ehle (who played Lizzie Bennet) plays Logue’s wife, Myrtle and David Bamber (who played Mr. Collins) appears, briefly, as a theater director in the scene in which Lionel Logue, who has a love of acting, fails an audition for “Richard III.” For his audition piece, he recites the famous lines, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.” A nice touch by screenwriter David Seidel, whose screenplay is literate, witty, and moving. If the Internet Movie Database is correct, Seidel’s last project before “The King’s Speech” was a David Carradine TV movie called “Kung Fu Killers”. He is also credited with the animated film “The King and I” and the Partridge Family TV biopic “Come On, Get Happy.” On the other hand, he also co-wrote “Tucker: The Man and His Dream.” David Seidel is nothing if not versatile.
The critics’ job is to criticize, even a film as good as “The King’s Speech,” although in this case the gripes are minor. Timothy Spall’s portrayal of Winston Churchill gets the speech
impediment down pat, but his mugging is a tad much. As for the narrative, there are two points in which it seems that Tom Hooper was forced to make an edit to reduce the running time. We are given the importance and danger of David’s love for Mrs. Simpson, but the whole drama of his coronation and the events leading up to his abdication are left out. Instead, David says he loves Wallis Simpson and wants to marry her and the next we know, he’s giving his abdication speech and Bertie will now be king. Likewise, during the rehearsal for Bertie’s coronation, there is a cut so that one moment Bertie demands that Logue sit in the family box at the ceremony against the Archbishop’s wishes, and the next he is snapping at Logue that he has no credentials as a doctor. It comes out of nowhere, but again, this may have been a sacrifice by Hooper to keep the running time down. It by no means damages the film, but the viewer may feel as though they just missed something.
In my review of “Nowhere Boy”, I confessed my teenaged love of The Beatles. I have to make another confession; one which will seem strange coming from someone with two degrees in film studies and who has taught university courses in film history: I hate to go to the cinema. It’s not the over-inflated ticket and concession stand prices (well, maybe just a bit); it’s the cinema audience. With the advent of VCRs and now DVRs, the public has grown accustomed to pausing films as they wish, so that if someone talks over an important part, they need only rewind. You can’t do that in a cinema, and yet people talk as loudly as though they were in their living room. Be honest. How many times have you wanted to hit someone over the head with your popcorn because they won’t shut up? You’re probably too polite to admit it, but I’m willing to bet you have every bit as much as I. That’s why the Arclight Theater at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood restored my faith in a cinema audience and the experience itself.
You can choose and purchase your seats before you go in order to bypass the long ticket line, have ushers who escort you to your seats and stand up in front to announce that they will remain in the theater to ensure that the sound and picture are of the highest quality. They even ask the audience to turn off their cell phones and to refrain from talking. By some miracle, as the friend who accompanied me promised - the audience did not talk once throughout the film. The seats are comfortable and the rows stacked so that your view of the screen is not blocked by the very tall person in front of you.
If you are in the Los Angeles area, there are several Arclight theaters, but I can only speak for the Hollywood location. Yes, it costs $2 more than a normal ticket but the difference between the Arclight and a regular movie theater is like the difference between flying first class and the very back of economy.
“The King’s Speech” went into limited release on November 26th, 2010 and is scheduled to go into wide release on December 10th.
Lorraine LoBianco is an Addy™ award-winning creative writer and brings fifteen years of experience from the film and television world having worked for Fox Movie Channel, Turner Classic Movies Interactive and The American Film Institute.
Contact the Segue Newsroom; segue@mediaquire.com
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