Although I very much enjoyed Tom Hooper’s sepia-tinted return to
the 1930s, The King’s Speech, I was also conscious
throughout of something very odd about the movie. It has to do with
but is not limited to the fact that King George VI (Colin Firth),
like all British monarchs since the Stuarts (or perhaps George III,
so far as Americans are concerned), was a pretty peripheral
historical figure to begin with, while the film’s pathographical
aspect — the poor man suffered from a stammer — is also not
exactly epic in scale. In the catalogue of human misfortunes, even
more severe speech impediments than his would not be numbered among
the top ten, nor yet the top hundred and ten, probably, even for
someone like the King whose fate it is to have to make public
speeches.
The oddness does not end there. There is something faintly
ridiculous about attempting to excite our pity for a royal
personage in the cultural absence of the kind of tragic stature
enjoyed by a King Oedipus or a King Lear — even if his fate were
(as it is not) a tragic one. Moreover, in comparison to the
world-historical significance of the outbreak of the Second World
War, which is the film’s context and which is represented at its
climax, the king’s affliction hardly looks like, well, a very big
deal. The film works hard to suggest that the fate of the empire
and, indeed, the free world depends on the King’s fluency but,
really, we know it did not and could not. Yet Mr. Firth’s portrayal
of the king, together with Geoffrey Rush’s of Lionel Logue, the
speech therapist who helps him, is so powerful that while we watch
we are scarcely conscious of these difficulties — which, after
all, the film has set for itself.
There is yet a further problem. As he is portrayed here,
and (I believe) in real life, the king would have loathed the idea
of this film’s appeal to our sympathy on his behalf. But in a way
this weakness is also the movie’s strength. Just as it portrays
“Bertie” (as the future king was known to his family) as someone
who hated the very idea of becoming king when his much more
glamorous older brother the Prince of Wales (Guy Pearce) — who
became, briefly, Edward VIII — unexpectedly abdicated in order to
marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, so it is itself a
paradoxical paean to the human side of a man who rigidly suppressed
his human feelings out of a sense of duty to his country. That was
something that a great many of his fellow countrymen (and ours)
were to have to do too over the next six years and something that
today’s audiences must wonder if we can ever do again, even at our
most need — which, pray God, will never come again.
That’s why, nearly 60 years after his death, George VI is
still able to encourage his admirers to believe again in the
unlikeliest of heroes. That, I think, is the appeal of the film to
a lot of people. Charles Moore of the London Daily
Telegraph
put it best, I think — and, by the way,
offered a compelling apologia for monarchy itself — when
he wrote:
Never before have I seen so clearly depicted just how
awful it is to be the British monarch. And, since it is a role
which, as Bertie himself points out early on, one cannot choose,
the rest of us feel terribly sorry for the person on whom the Crown
descends. Whenever republicans attack the “privilege” which
surrounds royalty their complaints seldom win much support because
anyone with an ounce of imagination can see how frightful the life
is, even if (partly because?) you are surrounded by what critics
love to call “flunkeys.” This helps explain why the sense of duty
is so important. Almost everyone else in public life is visibly
keen to get on, trying to survive, trying to be promoted, trying to
kick aside rivals, trying to accumulate power, honours and money.
It is important to have at least one person at the top who doesn’t
really want to be there. It is the precise opposite of Hitler’s
terrible will to power, against which George VI had to rally his
country. The British people came to love their King precisely
because he clearly had no ambition, and yet he did the job all the
same, because he knew he must.
This view of the film makes an interesting contrast with
Anthony Lane’s in the
New Yorker, who experiences it not as a celebration
but as a critique of some of these same qualities, together with
“all that is clenched and misted-over in the English character.”
Much of the picture, he writes, “girds itself in the trimmings of
decorum, and revels in the restitution of order, as required by
devotees of costume drama; on the other hand, what Logue uncovers,
in his sessions with the future king, is something rotten in the
state of England, which nothing, not even Australia, can
mend.”
Surely, here we must have the secret of the film’s
success: that it manages simultaneously to appeal to both sides in
the cultural wars that have raged in Britain and America, as
elsewhere in the West, since the 1960s: both, that is, to the
believers in relaxes and those fighting a presumably doomed
rearguard action on behalf of braces. Litterateurs will recognize
the allusion to William Blake’s enigmatical dictum: “Curse braces,
bless relaxes,” which can also be read two ways. Is it, in other
words, braces that are to be cursed and relaxes blessed? Or are we
instead to recognize the bracing effects of the curse alongside the
entropic relaxation of mere blessing? The answer, as everything
about Blake requires us to insist, is yes.
In the same way, the PBS “Masterpiece Classics”
series Downton Abbey ends with
simultaneous disasters for the family of the Earl of Grantham (Hugh
Bonneville) and the world at large. The latter disaster is of
course the outbreak of World War I, while the former is said to be
a result of the fact that someone “must say what I think.” To this
the Dowager Countess, played by Maggie Smith, pointedly replies: “I
don’t know why. Nobody else does.” There, too, I believe,
contemporary audiences must feel at once our morally relaxed
culture’s contempt for the inevitable hypocrisies of life in the
highly structured and even more highly strictured world of pre-1914
Britain and a kind of grudging admiration for those who felt, for
reasons we can hardly imagine anymore, that they had to live
according to its rules.
Maybe the relative triviality of the dramatic conflict
represented to us in The King’s Speech — which is or
ought to be accentuated by contrast with the outbreak of a World
War — actually makes the king’s heroism seem more real. That,
paradoxically (the guy is a king after all!) makes it more
accessible to us, surfeited as we are by a cinematic diet of merely
fantastical superheroes — like something we ourselves might be
capable of. Maybe here is a heroism we can believe in again. All
this is a roundabout way of saying that The King’s Speech
is good, yes, but good compared to what? Compared to the other
Academy Award nominees as Best Picture for instance. I hope it is
also, apart from anything else, a reminder to us playful
postmoderns of what a long way just a little bit of reality can
still take us.
