The King's Speech

We've just been to see The King's Speech, a good old-fashioned movie with a literate script, good parts for the actors to play, and a situation that's emotionally involving for the audience.

The two main parts are played by Colin Firth, as the soon-to-be king, George VI, and Geoffrey Rush as the Australian speech therapist who manages to get the King past his terrible public stutter and into a place where he can actually speak clearly and (mostly) safely in his public persona.

It's often very funny, with both Firth and Rush getting a share of the good retorts to the other's statements, and for once Rush doesn't have to play the part to the extreme in order to present an interesting performance. Firth's stutter seems as natural as is possible for any actor to present, and he brings the audience alongside him bit by bit, turning from a man who's always expected to say and do the right thing into someone whose humanity is gradually allowed to shine through.

Helena Bonham Carter plays the woman who would eventually be known as 'the Queen Mum'; at this point she's a woman of strength and character, and considerable support for her struggling husband. There are a bunch of other great British actors, including Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon, Claire Bloom, but few of them have any great length of screen time.

It occurred to me during the film that George VI must have died relatively young; his daughter Elizabeth succeeded him in the early fifties, and he only came to the throne a few years before the war, when his somewhat harum-scarum brother (as he's portrayed in the movie) abdicated. Of course, I only need to check out Wikipedia to get at the facts: George (or Albert as he was actually called until he ascended the throne) was born in 1895 and became king in 1936, when he was 41. He died in 1952, when he was only 57, after only 16 years as king. His brother, known as Edward VIII, was on the throne barely a year - 325 days in fact, and was never officially crowned. Edward wasn't just harum-scarum; he was a considerable womaniser. As his former private secretary, Alan Lascelles, wrote (not very privately) "for some hereditary or physiological reason [Edward's] normal mental development stopped dead when he reached adolescence."

Sturges and Wilberforce

A week or so ago I re-viewed Hail the Conquering Hero, a Preston Sturges comedy that I've got a copy of and which I'd seen about a year ago and really enjoyed. And then this week, I picked up Sullivan's Travels from the library. It was a different kettle of fish. It starts off in the same comedy fashion as HTCH, but then about halfway through changes tack altogether, and becomes the social issues movie that the hero is talking about from the beginning. Consequently, the last stages are quite dark.
I'm not sure that it works as well as HTCH; the very different high comedy tone of the first half takes quite a bit of shifting into the realist stuff of the second, and while the actors work well at it, and achieve the shift, the script just seems to be a game of two very different halves. For which only Sturges himself can be to blame. It's not as if he doesn't warn us: the opening scene has Sullivan, the Hollywood director, trying to sell his recent social issues movie to two producers, without success. In a way it's a commentary on what's going to happen later. I'm just not sure that it all holds together.
I also watched Amazing Grace, the movie about the slave abolitionist, William Wilberforce - I'd heard it was pretty good (although my old friend, James Berardinelli didn't think much of it); certainly the production values are top quality. However, the script is straight out of the same historic period as Sullivan's Travels.
It's similar in tone to those biopics that Hollywood made by the score back in the forties, films that were always well done because they had big name stars in them, and plenty of money thrown at them, but which usually suffered from showing only the high points of a person's life and seldom had any forward-moving dramatic structure.
The only difference between those biopics and the new movie is that this one mucks about with the chronology, perhaps in order to show that it's more modern. All this does is keep the viewer at a distance, partly because it's hard to figure out where we are in terms of the progress of Wilberforce's career, and partly because it becomes difficult to get involved emotionally with his desire to see slavery come to an end.
I'm not sure why it's so uninvolving. Partly Ionn Grufford in in the lead role is inconsistent in tone: sometimes he carries us with him, other times you sense too strongly the 'performing' that's going on. But more than this, there's only one scene in which we are shown the horrors of what it was like to be a slave captured by the traders. And that's when Rufus Sewell (who mostly appears in the film as just slightly off his rocker) demonstrates the chains which bound the slaves. A later scene, with a narration about the way in which slaves were often burnt to death in the midst of the sugar fields, and another where a boatload of upper class people are told by Wilberforce to smell the smell of death, just don't work - not for me, at least. The first is a blurred visual approach to the horrors; the second is so predictable the film has lost you before it arrives.
And virtually the only African to appear in the movie - Equiano - is treated so well that it undercuts just how difficult it must have been for him to try and live amongst English people of the time.
Albert Finney and Michael Gambon rescue their scenes as best they can, along with a bunch of other well-known English character actors, Ciarán Hinds and Benedict Cumberbatch, to name just a couple. But there's very little pace, very little suspense, very little sense of the urgency of the task. And absolutely no mention at the end of the movie that the slave trade around the world is back with a vengeance, and that there are probably more people in slavery of one sort or another now than there ever were in the 18th century.
And, as a footnote, not one person looking as though they're in need of the best acne treatment available at the time.

Joe's Palace

Stephen Poliakoff's latest tv film was shown last night. It’s one of two ‘companion’ pieces, the other (which stars Maggie Smith) will show next week.

Thomas Sutcliffe, of The Independent, wrote:
[it had] “a looping, elliptical style of storytelling that can make it very difficult to say, once the final credits start rolling, exactly what the whole thing was about.”

Never was a truer word said without quite being said. I don’t think Mr Sutcliffe intended to disparage Poliakoff’s piece; I think he meant to say it was full of meaning that wasn’t quite graspable. Unfortunately what his words actually say on the surface is exactly what I felt about the film – and so did the other three people watching it with me.

There was so much wrong with it: its sluggish pace, the dreadfully-acted main character Joe (if it was dreadful acting; maybe this boy can’t act) who seemed to be an empty shell; the overdone sex scenes which added nothing to the film – couldn’t we have been left to guess, along with Joe, what was going on upstairs?

Then there was the Michael Gambon character, which Gambon did his utmost to invest with some intelligence. Unfortunately, Poliakoff gave him so little to work on, and such a poor motivation for his long-standing reticence to do anything useful with his life, that in the end you thought: Get on with it, you silly old duffer. He finally did, and not before time.

People kept coming into The House and saying there were strange vibes – all except Joe, who didn’t seem to know a vibe from a vibraphone. He just sat listening to his CDs with his headphones on (including a very silly pair he picked from a host of silly gifts) or writing his notes, and people kept interrupting him. His response was to sound as dull as possible so that hopefully they’d go away and leave him alone. Eventually they pretty much did.