Stephen Frears (2006)
After the success of his television screenplay The Deal about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (which I’ve not seen), Peter Morgan does The Queen, set in the British summer of 1997 that was bookended by the election of New Labour and the death of Princess Diana. The film is hopeless to start with – clumsy scene-setting (on the morning after election night, the Queen’s press secretary virtually explains to her who Blair is) and feeble jokes (when the Blairs go to the Palace, he commits the solecism of asking if he can form a Government instead of waiting to be asked: even if this really happened, the crude staging makes it incredible). Chunks of exposition in the script keep getting in the actors’ way (Prince Philip puts the Queen and the Queen Mother in the picture about the procedure for flying the royal standard at Buckingham Palace) – and Morgan seems to be straining throughout for easy satire. Fortunately, the intelligent direction and, especially, the main performances thwart this ambition and make The Queen interesting.
I’d thought from seeing clips that Helen Mirren was too facially expressive as the Queen – and she is, but I found myself accepting this after a while because of Mirren’s sympathetic intelligence and self-validating presence. (Not surprisingly, the film finds it easier to convey the bizarreness of the Royal Family’s social rituals than the abnormality of their emotional lives. The contrast with the Blairs’ home life is obvious but effective.) As John Lahr has written, Mirren rescues the Queen (and The Queen) from both satire and sentimentality. In spite of her height (and hauteur), Mirren has devised a heavy, somehow obstinate walk that seems to cut her down to the real Queen’s size (and makes her vulnerable). She fiddles anxiously with her pearls or her fountain pen – it’s believable that the professionally controlled monarch allows feelings to show in this way. Mirren also brings off affectingly the emotional high point of the Queen’s first sight of a deer on the Balmoral estate – although this develops into a weird subplot that left me unclear whether this ‘beautiful creature’ was supposed to connect with the Princess-hounded-to-her-death or was meant to reflect the Queen’s greater ability to express feelings for animals than for people (even animals that her family hunts … with Diana the goddess of hunting, thinking about this got me still more confused).
As Tony Blair (whom he also played in The Deal), Michael Sheen seems a bit crumpled and runtish at the start – he’s insufficiently excited in the wake of his election victory – but Sheen is good at expressing Blair’s divided loyalties in the aftermath of Diana’s death; he gets across a mixture of conviction and opportunism that’s convincing. The actors repeatedly overcome stupidly conceived scenes (as the Blairs watch the Queen’s broadcast on the eve of Diana’s funeral, Cherie talks over it and Tony has to shush her – but when Sheen is left alone to watch the TV screen, we watch his face and it’s a strong moment). There are, to paraphrase, three leading roles in this picture: although not a subtle actress, Diana knew how to perform to camera and her presence is insinuating – especially a cut to her at the end of her own funeral that seems to put her in a position of strength, enjoying the establishment’s discomfort. The most suspenseful element in the film is how much we will hear the Royal Family deride the public reaction to Diana’s death; the unsurprising solution is to ration criticism of the hysteria and put it mainly in the mouth of the Duke of Edinburgh, the family member notorious for being a verbal loose cannon. There’s a more subversive moment when the Queen tours the massed ranks of floral tributes at Kensington Palace and the scene is edited to suggest that her close-to-tears reactions were due not to grief but to reading messages that were derogatory about the royal treatment of Diana. The Queen doesn’t attempt to answer the question of whether the week between Diana’s death and funeral marked a sea change or an aberration in British public life and emotional history. The news clips (mostly ITV rather than BBC – I assume because Granada funded the film) suggest something far more distant than recent history. The closing shots of the Queen and Blair talking on the first of his weekly visits to her in the autumn of the year suggest an uneasy return to business as usual. Roger Allam gives a thoughtful performance as the Queen’s press secretary. With James Cromwell as the Duke of Edinburgh, Alex Jennings as Prince Charles, Sylvia Syms (a screen presence far stronger in old age than she ever was as a beautiful, bland young actress) as the Queen Mother, Mark Bazeley as Alistair Campbell and Helen Macrory as Cherie Blair.
24 September 2006
