The Queen
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Movie Reviews of The Queen
Movie Review: The Royal treatment
Summary: 5 Stars
The poster for "The Queen" - practically a study in Elizabeth's facial pores - led me to sense that the film would be a savage attack on the Queen and the monarchy. Instead, I found it to be an evenhanded and even sympathetic glance into the reaction of the Royal Family to British rage over their evident coolness to Princess Diana's death in 1997.
The film portrays the events in question in a fairly straightforward manner. After Diana's final death ride, the Queen and her family are rousted from sleep and watch the unfolding story on television at Balmoral castle in Scotland, privately expressing heartfelt annoyance that Diana is again generating attention. Prince Philip (played admirably by American actor James Cromwell) is especially furious throughout the film, expressing the royals' contempt for Diana and what they felt was public mawkishness egged on by the British press. Their official reaction (except, curiously, for Prince Charles's) was unemotional and measured, driven by protocol (whether to raise the Royal standard to half staff or to make public statements) and a continuing desire to keep Diana in her place.
Newly-elected PM Tony Blair (an incredible Michael Sheen) opposes the royals, but his close contact with them also lets him understand their point of view. Going against his young staff, whose anti-royal stance has them enjoying the Royal discomfort, Blair shows himself perhaps a bit too sympathetic to the Queen's plight, a tendency that might explain his recent woes.
"The Queen" is a study in contrasts -- between the royal world of starchy reserve that no longer inspires, and the messiness of Tony Blair's TV-watching and cereal-chomping young family; between a confessional media culture (that Diana played to the hilt) and an older culture that prized privacy and decorum above all. The fun of the film is watching the Royals becoming aware of the need to embrace this new culture and by so doing remain at least minimally relevant to their people.
Helen Mirren both impersonates her subject (!) and interprets her. Mirren's performance helps the audience make sense of the Queen's inner struggle as well as of her professional carapace of detachment. A scene where she throw her pack of dogs of morsel of meat, and then with a hand gesture commands them to wait (they do!) before eating it, exemplifies the self-control that Elizabeth demands of herself and expects of those around her. Only once did the movie leap the bounds of plausibility, as the Queen, driving her own truck around Balmoral at the height of the crisis, gets stuck in the middle of a river. Her sighting of a beautiful, hunted animal begins to open her eyes to her people's grief over Diana, another beautiful "animal" hunted to death. Though the scene screams "metaphor!," the script is silent, allowing the viewer to make the connection.
The DVD extras are spare, consisting of a not-too-revelatory "making of" mini-flick.
"The Queen" is a standout movie, very solidly cast, very well-written, daring and successful in tackling recent events, believable and illustrative of the time period. That it does not hit one over the head with facile conclusions -- and that it allows a variety of points of view to co-exist unresolved -- demonstates its confidence and is very attractive. A veddy, veddy good film.
Movie Review: Great film, good performances, but not fully true to history
Summary: 5 Stars
Love Helen Mirren, (and loved her as a younger Elizabeth I in the HBO 2-part series as well, look for it!)and all the cast is excellent as well. But after reading Tina Brown's Chronicles of Diana and YES I know its' a rehash of what we all "know" of those years and that particular soap opera, but the last chapters of the book after Diana's death, are fascinating in that they are the same time period shown in "the Queen". According to people who were there, servants, officials and the like, the emotional sense of how the family reacted toward the young princes, William and Harry, has none of the coldness and emotional "lets just get on with life" attitude implied in the film and in the review, top, which says "Prince Phillip clumsily tried to help by taking the boys hunting." (paraphrased). Well, these boys had spent their summer vacations riding and hunting at Balmoral all their lives, and this is what they thoroughly enjoyed. It wasn't something their stuffy old grandfather forced them to do. The book describes the entire Royal family rallying around the boys---Princess Anne, Charles' sister, brought her 20 yr old son and 16 yr old daughter, to help entertain their cousins, and she herself made a project of taking the very emotionally fragile Harry under her wing, and taking him riding and hiking out in the Balmoral hills alone. Charles pulled out family albums and spent time going over the past good times the family had had. Prince Phillip their grandfather, in particular, was very protective, showed "gruff tenderness" and did make sure they hunted,rode and kept active, as opposed to brooding and staying glued to the maudlin TV coverage. Actually, for the benefit of the boys, the Queen ordered all TVs and radios removed in the castle. The outdoors life is one the family is used to and enjoys. Those who criticised the Royals for having the boys there in Balmoral instead of exposing them to the hysterical crowds in London...well, I don't know which would give them more nightmares in years to come but I can guess. Also, other little tidbits in the book of that week were once when Prince Phillip came on the intercom when the decisions about the State funeral were being made and broke in, shouting, "those boys have just lost their mother...they are not a commodity..." Brown, the author quotes her source as saying "you could hear the voice of a real grandfather." Later, it was Prince Phillip, not Charles who talked the princes into walking in the moving spectacle of the royal men behind the cortege. He told the sobbing William, "If I walk, will you walk with me?" And during the long walk to the Cathedral, spoke quietly to the two boys of the famous sights they were passing, speaking softly the whole way there. All these vignettes, which would have made all the Royal more human, were left out of the film, good as it was, there was an agenda, that doesn't have to be spelled out. The Queen could admire a royal appearing stag, later shown beheaded...but her love and her husband's love for the grandsons was never shown, nor was the love of the whole family for the boys or for each other, despite all Diana had done to blacken the reputation of that family in the press. Not that they're perfect, just human.Movie Review: Cracks Appear in the All-Too Human Queen
Summary: 5 Stars
The Queen starts out unambitiously enough. Elizabeth II, Queen of England, meeting the newly-elected Prime Minister, Tony Blair, a young up-and-comer who is determined to shake things up a bit in government. Elizabeth assures Blair, through her ceremony, forms, and observation that she has survived ten Prime Ministers (her own education in such relations starting with none other than Winston Churchill), that she will not be shaken up. That it is the young-buck Blair who has everything to learn, and not the stolid, stoic Queen.
Of course, Elizabeth was raised in a different time and age. Ensconced in various palaces, she rarely gets the opportunity to see what the realm she ironically leads, is like. When her ex-daughter-in-law, the popular Diana, tragically dies in an auto accident, Elizabeth has no conception of what a storm it will set off, both in Britain and the world. She has no *ability* to conceive of it, either: she believes that death is a private affair, and that England is a country of people who are as private and guarded as is she. On top of that, she personally bears Diana no particular goodwill, and so Elizabeth decides to treat Diana's death as a non-event.
But the British people--a different British people than Elizabeth imagines--demands a response. Demands a human, feeling monarchy. Blair, the new man of the people, represents this to the Queen, and so we are introduced to a struggle of wills between the old, controlled, powerful Queen, and the new face of Blair. It is also a struggle, more generally, between tradition and change. If you know what normally wins that struggle, or you remember these particular events in your own lifetime, then you know which side wins.
Elizabeth is presented an impossible choice: change and relent, or the monarchy, itself, will crack. It is a wonderfully dramatic scenario, and thrilling to watch it portrayed by such a talented, capable actress. Mirren will win the Best Actress Oscar, and she will deserve it.
It is also fun to watch other famous characters, such as Blair and Prince Charles, portrayed. It's hard to not like Blair in this film (as he eventually comes around to respect the monarchy he once found silly and dated), and hard not to feel sorry for him in his own, more recent, fall from popular approval. Prince Charles is another matter all-together: it is moving to watch him grieve for Diana, and painful to watch how this man (the would-be King of England) is so bowed over and controlled by others in his life. Despite the fact that the Queen is the centerpiece, the others are all interesting character studies in their own right.
It is rare to have a historical film about events so recent, revolving around people still living and capable (and, in fact, still in power). It's nice to be given this sort of insight into the people we still see on the news, to be able to reconsider our once-held notions of them, instead of waiting until they're long-dead to reflect. The Queen provides us with this rare opportunity, and it does so in an entertaining and brilliantly acted way.
This is a wonderful movie.
Five stars.
Movie Review: "What a family!"
Summary: 5 Stars
Helen Mirren is at the center of Stephen Frears' "The Queen," a fictionalized film based on real events that took place in 1997. Mirren physically and psychologically inhabits the role of HRH Elizabeth II, a monarch who never sought the heavy responsibilities that came with the crown, but who, for more than four decades, performed her role with dignity.
The film's main theme is the manner in which the royals reacted to the tragic death of Princess Diana. Newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair, a "modernist," believed that Diana should be mourned publicly and that flags should be flown in royal residences at half-staff. In addition, he urged Elizabeth to make some sort of public statement to the British people, who criticized the Queen for grieving privately on her estate in Scotland. How shocked Elizabeth was when she learned that some members of the press and public blamed her for Diana's unhappiness and subsequent death! In one scene, a bewildered Elizabeth murmurs, "It's a bad dream." On another occasion, she expresses her chagrin at the turn events have taken: "There's been a change--a shift in values." She cannot understand why, for the first time, members of the royal family should be expected to show their feelings in public.
Miss Mirren's stellar performance overshadows everyone else's in the cast, although James Cromwell is effective as a bombastic and insensitive Prince Philip and Michael Sheen does nice work as a callow Tony Blair who gradually grows into his new job as Prime Minister of England. Although he is at first put off by Elizabeth's stiffness and formality, Blair later comes to admire her devotion to duty. Alex Jennings, who does not physically resemble Prince Charles, plays the Prince as a compassionate man who, although he divorced Diana, still respected her devotion to William and Harry. Sylvia Syms plays the Queen Mum as a cartoonish matriarch who says whatever pops into her head.
Frears uses archival footage of Diana and the hordes who paid tribute to her memory to bring back the emotionally charged atmosphere of those dark days. The director contrasts these crowd scenes with the eerily remote and silent castle to which Elizabeth and her family retreat following the death of the "People's Princess." Was Elizabeth truly as uncaring and cold as she appeared to many members of the press and public? Did the royals mistreat Diana and somehow cause her to act recklessly? There are no easy answers to these questions, nor does Frears take a clear position on these issues. "The Queen" is worth seeing for its satirical and incisive look at a particular time in British history when a venerated institution, the British monarchy, came under fire after the royal family failed to meet a challenge that they never expected to face--to be the mourners-in-chief for a woman whom they personally disliked but who was cherished by the entire world.
Movie Review: A movie fit for a queen
Summary: 5 Stars
"Nowadays, people want glamour and tears, the grand performance. I'm not very good at that. I never have been. I prefer to keep my feelings to myself." -- Queen Elizabeth II
Retaining the dignified privacy that's typical of England's royal family versus showing feelings to an upset and saddened British public that craves monarchial comfort and emotion -- those are the difficult options facing Queen Elizabeth II after Princess Diana's sudden death in this spellbinding movie starring Helen Mirren.
Following Diana's death, it's a clash of old-world thinking from the queen and her entourage, up against the newly elected Tony Blair, a "modern" and forward-thinking politician who hopes to revolutionize England. In Blair's corner are the people of Great Britain, who loved Diana and now scorn the queen's reluctance to display remorse after the princess' untimely death. In a world filled with 24-hour news cycles and wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve reality TV shows, the public desires an appearance from Queen Elizabeth II to put a stamp on memorializing the "people's princess."
But the queen has a mindset and a long history of her own, not all of it regal, and she isn't easily pigeonholed. A former mechanic in World War II and a lover of the outdoors and dogs, Queen Elizabeth II defies convenient stereotype. Though initially her airs reek of snobbishness, Elizabeth is actually a down-to-earth, razor-sharp gal who's filled with the same range of humanity that all of us possess and truly loves and believes in her country. Observing her interaction with people and during personal moments is fascinating and hearkens back to a bygone era that valued familial privacy, honor, restraint and proper decorum.
Nuance abounds from Blair as his relationship with the queen evolves and he begins to view her less as an archaic figurehead and more as a noble leader who in many ways can't help her mentality and circumstances. Blair, who starts his term as prime minister a bit in awe of the queen's presence, delicately begins to open up and make suggestions to assist with her predicament of holding on to private family grief versus showing her face to the people of England. Ultimately, though there are some critical words along the way, both the increasingly confident Blair and the staid, honorable queen show themselves to be compromising leaders who only want to do what's right for their country.
This glimpse into privileged worlds is made even better by stellar acting by everyone involved. Michael Sheen is practically a carbon copy of the real Tony Blair; Mirren won an Academy Award for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II; and everyone else, from the boorish James Crommwell (the Queen's husband) to the stately Roger Allam (the Queen's adviser) to the brusquely opinionated Helen McCrory (Blair's wife), were spectacular in their roles.