The King’s Speech (2010) Review
7/10
A duke steps up to a microphone at Wembley in 1925 and can’t speak. Nine years later his brother abdicates, he becomes king, and a war is coming in which the only thing a constitutional monarch does is talk on the radio. The 7 is for a film that does a small thing very well. Two men in a room, a professional relationship neither of them wants, and a technical problem with a technical solution, and the film is content to be about exactly that.
I enjoy this film a good deal, and the Oscar result still sours me on it a little. Firth and Rush are a pleasure together, the consulting-room scenes are funny and tender, and I’d happily sit through them again. It’s also a good film that beat The Social Network, and the mechanism behind that win is the clearest example I know of the Academy’s preferences operating without interference.
It Is a Two-Hander
The film’s real subject is a professional relationship conducted in one room over several years, and everything outside that room is context. The consulting room material is the whole picture. Logue insists on first names, on equality, on his own methods, and the negotiation about the terms of the relationship is more interesting than the treatment itself. The first session establishes the whole arrangement in about four minutes. Logue makes a wager, plays a recording, and sends him home with a disc, and the scene is a professional showing competence to a client who has no intention of returning.
That negotiation is also the plot. A king can’t be spoken to that way, a therapist can’t work otherwise, and the film generates two hours from two people arguing about the conditions under which they’ll proceed.
The exercises are the film’s best comedy and its best drama at once. Bertie rolls on a floor, sings his sentences and swears in a continuous stream, and Firth plays a man of enormous dignity submitting to indignity because the alternative is worse. The swearing scene is my favorite thing in the picture. Watching a man of that rank let loose a string of obscenities to get a sentence out is funny and sad in the same breath, and I think it’s the truest scene in the film.
The swearing sequence is also the film’s commercial history in miniature. It produced a certificate problem in several territories, was trimmed for an American re-release, and a picture about a man learning to speak was edited for the words he says.
A negotiation about the terms of a relationship is a better engine than the relationship itself. Two people arguing about how they’ll work together generates scenes indefinitely. The requirement is that both positions are professionally necessary. Logue can’t work without equality and Bertie can’t grant it, and neither is being difficult.
Helena Bonham Carter has the third position and is given less than the film needs. Elizabeth finds Logue, manages the arrangement, and is the person who understands what’s required before either man does, in about six scenes. Let indignity be the treatment. A dignified character submitting to something ridiculous is both funny and moving, and the same scene does both jobs.
Keep the room. The film’s strength is the consulting room and its weakness is everything shot outside it.
Firth and Rush
Firth won Best Actor and the performance is technically careful in a way that’s easy to underrate.
The stammer is constructed instead of performed. It varies by situation, is worse with certain consonants, improves with singing and with swearing, and the variation is consistent throughout. That means the film can convey a state by what he can say.
What he does beyond the technique is play a man who’s not interesting. Bertie is dutiful, limited, badly educated for the role, and aware of all three, and Firth declines to give him a hidden depth the record doesn’t support.
The childhood material comes in one monologue during a session: a nanny who neglected him, a father who mocked him and a brother who died.
Firth delivers all of it while working on a model airplane, and I think that’s the film’s best single piece of staging. A man whose hands are busy isn’t performing his own history, so the speech never turns into a confession scene. That’s the scene that moves me.
Rush is the better performance and was nominated in supporting. That’s a category placement the film’s structure doesn’t really support. Logue is a failed actor, is unqualified, is lying about his credentials, and Rush plays the fraudulence and the real skill as the same quality.
His audition for Richard III is the scene that establishes the failure properly. He’s too old, isn’t good enough, knows both, and the film gives its most sympathetic character a humiliation that’s nothing to do with the plot.
What It Gets Wrong About History
The film compresses and rearranges, and one compression is real instead of dramatic. Logue’s treatment began in 1926 and the film places the significant work in the late thirties. That converts a decade of gradual improvement into a crisis intervention. That’s a legitimate dramatic choice.
The Churchill material is another matter, and it’s a weak spot.
Churchill appears as Bertie’s ally against the abdication, which reverses his actual position, since Churchill backed Edward throughout the crisis. The film wanted a recognizable figure on the right side and grabbed the most recognizable one available. I’d have cut him entirely before rewriting him.
The larger omission is the politics. Edward and Wallis Simpson’s sympathies are gestured at in one scene, the family’s own position on Germany before 1939 is absent, and the film’s subject is a speech impediment instead of a monarchy. That’s a defensible scope and a heavy exclusion.
Logue’s own records were also only made available to the production by his grandson during development. That’s the reason the consulting-room material has the detail it does and the political material doesn’t. Guy Pearce is also very good as Edward and the film uses him well. He’s charming, is entirely selfish, and the scene where he mocks his brother’s stammer at a family dinner is the one place the film shows where the problem came from.
The Craft Is Conventional and Deliberate
Danny Cohen’s photography is the one element with a visible idea, and it’s used consistently. Bertie is filmed with wide lenses in close quarters, pushed to the edge of frames, with large empty spaces beside him. That produces a physical sense of a man in a room he doesn’t fit. The consulting room walls are also distressed and peeling, and the contrast against the palace interiors is doing class work without any dialogue about it.
The wallpaper was reportedly chosen and then aged further on set, and Hooper has said the room was the first thing designed. That’s consistent with a film that knew where its subject lived. Beyond that, the direction is unobtrusive by design. Hooper covers scenes, stays out of the way, and lets two actors work. That’s the correct decision for this material and is exactly what the Best Director argument is about.
One visual idea applied consistently is worth more than several applied occasionally. The wide lens and the empty space beside him is the whole film’s condition stated in a frame. Pick the idea that matches the subject. A man who doesn’t fit is filmed as a man who doesn’t fit.
Contrast your locations on texture. Peeling walls against palace interiors argues about class without a line of dialogue.
Unobtrusive direction serves a two-hander and it’s not the same as directing well. Both things can be true about the same film. Hooper has said he chose the wide lenses deliberately for the discomfort. That’s worth crediting because it’s the film’s one authored visual decision and he made it on purpose and not by default.
The Social Network
Best Picture and Best Director went to this. The Social Network won three awards, for Sorkin’s screenplay, for the Reznor and Ross score and for editing.
The formal argument isn’t close. Fincher’s film has a structure built from two depositions running against a chronological narrative, dialogue at a speed almost nobody attempts, a score that reconceived what a film about computers could sound like, and a central performance about a man with no access to his own motives. Hooper’s film has two men in a room and a wide lens.
The mechanism is also documented. Harvey Weinstein ran the campaign, it was effective, the Academy’s membership skewed older, and a film about British institutional duty during wartime is closer to that membership’s interests than a film about twenty-year-olds building a website. The Producers Guild, Directors Guild and Screen Actors Guild all went the same way. That means this wasn’t a narrow upset.
It also cost around fifteen million dollars and took over four hundred. That’s a ratio that generates its own momentum. A small British film outperforming by that margin arrives at a ceremony as a story.
The comparison has aged in one direction. The Social Network is now routinely called the defining film of its decade, and this one is mostly remembered for having beaten it. I think that’s unfair to Hooper’s film, which is good at what it does, and entirely fair to the vote, which got it wrong.
A work about a familiar institutional virtue will outperform a work about an unfamiliar new phenomenon with the same voting body, every time. The new phenomenon becomes the historical document and the familiar virtue becomes the pleasant film that won.
Fincher and Hooper made films of entirely different ambition and the vote was about which experience the room preferred.
Ten years is the minimum interval for judging a result. Nothing about the 2011 ceremony predicted how the two films would be discussed in 2021.Sorkin and Fincher have both been gracious about it in the years since, and Seidler had been writing the script for decades and had a stammer himself. That’s the context that makes the win difficult to resent.
Should you watch The King’s Speech?
Yes, and it holds up better than the Oscar argument suggests. I’m giving it a 7 because two men negotiating the terms of their work together is a pleasure to watch, Firth builds a stammer so carefully that the film can tell you his state by what he can say, and the wide lens on a man who doesn’t fit the room is the one visual idea it needs. It stops short of an 8 because everything outside that room, from Churchill to the politics, is thinner and sloppier than the scenes inside it.
