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An
Excess of Good Sense THE
QUEEN: Directed by Stephen Frears. Written by Peter Morgan. Cinematography,
Affonso Beato. Music, Alexandre Desplat. Starring Helen Mirren, Michael
Sheen, James Cromwell, Alex Jennings and Sylvia Syms. Miramax Films,
2006. PG-13. 97 minutes. Where were you on Aug. 31, 1997? Perhaps you were vacationing with family or getting ready to return to school. If you are old enough to drive a car today, chances are that you'll remember. That's because Aug. 31, 1997, is the day that Diana Spencer, former princess of Wales, died after a high-speed chase in a Paris tunnel. In a sense, the tragic end of Diana's life coincided with the birth of Tony Blair — the birth of his professional life, that is — who was elected prime minister only four months earlier, almost to the day.
The Queen, the new film by director Stephen Frears, examines the intersection of Blair's new government with the British royal family during the week following Diana's death. It's no secret now, nor was it then, that Diana — aka Her Royal Highness, or HRH, which sounds like an illegal doping substance — wasn't chatty with Queen Elizabeth II, especially after her divorce from Prince Charles in 1996. What Frears' film intends to dramatize is how the world's most famous living monarch broke with tradition — at Blair's insistence — when Britain demanded her public sympathy. The movie, much like the royal family, is fiercely controlled and calculating. It blends actual footage and dramatic footage with such precision that at times I wondered whether I was watching a documentary. The cast members, with the exception of Prince Charles (Alex Jennings), are so well-matched to their living counterparts that you almost forget this is a dramatization. Every performance other than Jennings's is spot-on, particularly Michael Sheen as a warm but brash Tony Blair and James Cromwell as Prince Philip, the least empathetic royal in the palace. But both the story and acclaim belong to Helen Mirren as the queen. Her performance is arguably the best female lead this year. It's spectacular to watch. Inside and out, this isn't your typical view of the queen. From without, we see her in her nightgown and other states of casual dress. We see her writing in her journal before she goes to bed. In other words, this is a human queen, not the crown-of-frost depiction we know from the media. More importantly, screenwriter Peter Morgan creates a complex portrait of an aging leader whose every instinct is to follow tradition, but who's smart enough to know that to survive she needs to modernize. And fast. That involves the possibility of addressing the nation after Diana's death, something no one in Buckingham Palace supports. Unfortunately, despite Mirren's sensational performance — one which depicts the very embodiment of tradition coming to grips with a reality she can barely accept — the film is sometimes as conservative in execution as the people it attempts to dramatize. In other words, to its detriment, The Queen takes on some of the qualities it means to expose, such as an absence of emotion and an unwillingness to deviate from protocol. The film is a little smug and tedious in places, giving off the feel of a television documentary (which, it turns out, it was). Make no mistake: The Queen is one of the better films released this year. But you'll need to decide if that says more about the quality of films we've seen this year or whether all the hype about The Queen is true. |
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