The King’s Speech (2010) Review
7/10
A duke steps up to a microphone at Wembley in 1925 and cannot 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.
The result is the argument. This is a good film that beat one of the defining films of its decade, and the mechanism behind it is the clearest example 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 demonstrating competence to a client who has no intention of returning.
That negotiation is also the plot. A king cannot be spoken to that way, a therapist cannot work otherwise, and the film generates two hours from two people arguing about the conditions under which they will proceed.
The exercises are the film’s best comedy and its best drama simultaneously. Rolling on a floor, singing sentences, swearing continuously, and Firth plays a man of enormous dignity submitting to indignity because the alternative is worse.
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 will work together generates scenes indefinitely. The requirement is that both positions are professionally necessary. Logue cannot work without equality and Bertie cannot 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 is 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 is 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, which means the film can convey a state by what he can say.
What he does beyond the technique is play a man who is 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 does not support.
The childhood material is delivered in one monologue during a session, covering a nanny who neglected him, a father who mocked him and a brother who died, and Firth delivers all of it while working on a model aeroplane, which is the film’s best single piece of staging and keeps the whole speech from becoming a confession scene, since a man whose hands are busy is not performing his own history.
Rush is the better performance and was nominated in supporting, which is a category placement the film’s structure does not really support. Logue is a failed actor, is unqualified, is lying about his credentials, and Rush plays the fraudulence and the genuine skill as the same quality.
His audition for Richard III is the scene that establishes the failure properly. He is too old, is not good enough, knows both, and the film gives its most sympathetic character a humiliation that has nothing to do with the plot.
What It Gets Wrong About History
The film compresses and rearranges, and one compression is substantive instead of dramatic.
Logue’s treatment began in 1926 and the film places the significant work in the late thirties, which converts a decade of gradual improvement into a crisis intervention. That is a legitimate dramatic choice.
The appeasement material is not. Churchill is presented as an ally of Bertie’s against the abdication, which reverses his actual position, since Churchill supported Edward throughout the crisis. The film needed a recognizable figure on the right side and used the most recognizable one available.
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, which is a defensible scope and a substantial exclusion.
Logue’s own records were also only made available to the production by his grandson during development, which is the reason the consulting-room material has the texture it does and the political material does not.
Guy Pearce is also very good as Edward and the film uses him precisely. He is 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 is used consistently.
Bertie is filmed with wide lenses in close quarters, pushed to the edge of frames, with large empty spaces beside him, which produces a physical sense of a man in a room he does not 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, which is 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, which is the correct decision for this material and is precisely 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 does not fit is filmed as a man who does not 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 is 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, which is worth crediting because it is 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 is not 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, which means this was not a narrow upset.
It also cost around fifteen million dollars and took over four hundred, which is 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 described as the defining film of its decade, and this one is a good film that is mostly remembered for having beaten it.
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 not about ambition. It 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, which is the context that makes the win difficult to resent.
Should you watch The King’s Speech?
Yes, and it holds up better than the argument suggests. Two men negotiating the terms under which they will work together, a stammer constructed so carefully that the film can convey a state through what he can say, peeling walls against palace interiors, and a wide lens on a man who does not fit the room.
Frequently Asked Questions
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