Stop Him Before He Reviews Again! - Roger L Simon begins his Oscar season with “The Queen”
Well, not completely, because he did stir up a little trouble a couple of weeks ago with his perhaps excessive praise of "Borat." But blogger/Academy member Simon is back with another year of "out of school" reviews of Oscar candidates, which he began at National Review Online and continued last year on Pajamas Media. THE QUEEN There are three winners in Stephen Frears and Peter Morgan's witty and affecting "The Queen." (What? He credits the screenwriter up with the director? Damn right, I do. Get used to it). They are Tony Blair, Queen Elizabeth and Scotland's Balmoral Castle. Those who have read the reviews will know what I mean about the first two, but those who have actually seen the film will understand what I mean about the third.
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The magnificence of Balmoral and the wild beauty of its surroundings - this movie may be the most successful Scotland travelogue since “Geordie” - provide a dramatic setting for the film whose plot hinges on whether Elizabeth will abandon her “country castle” for stuffy Buckingham to honor the tragic death of Princess Di. When you see Balmoral, you understand why Elizabeth might not want to leave for reasons more complex than mere antipathy for Diana. When Tony Blair urges Elizabeth to come to London to meet the mourning masses, he is pulling her away from something, a world that may have depth and feeling at least equal to what Diana and her legions represent. In fact, the film’s most poignant sequence shows Elizabeth motoring about her wild lands in an old (I think) Range Rover - she does this herself; the movie reminds us she was a mechanic during WWII - when she comes upon a majestic stag she saves from some off screen hunters (probably including her dimwitted husband Philip, played well by James Cromwell). Later, inexorably, the stag is killed. The Queen is revealed as an environmentalist of her own kind and we sense there is more to her than we thought. When Elizabeth finally does go to London, we understand that her “acquiescence” to Blair’s wishes may constitute less of a change of personality than meets the eyes. The old girl probably had it in her all along.
Now perhaps I am an easy audience for this film - and more sympathetic than I should be to Elizabeth (the movie sent me to Wikipedia to review her life) - because I was never swept up in Dianamania. Yes, Di had all the right attitudes toward AIDS, land mines and such, and, yes, she was beautiful in an untouchable sort of way, but all those Mediterranean yacht trysts with cheesy Fayeds, topless paparazzi pixs, etc. undercut her largesse for me. I guess I prefer my saints in hairier shirts.
So as soon I “got” this film, I was on its side because its refreshingly un-PC attitude surprised me. I expected it to be “royals bad/Di good” - something it decidedly is not. I also think it is well made enough to get the Academy on its side as well. Helen Mirren as Elizabeth is a heavy early Oscar favorite for best actress. Frears (director), Morgan (screenplay), Michael Sheen (Tony Blair - for supporting actor) are also in the hunt. I would like to tip the hat as well to master Director of Photography Affonso Beato (”All About My Mother,” the forthcoming “Love in the Time of Cholera”). He made me want to go to Scotland.
Roger L. Simon was nominated for an Academy Award for his adaptation of Isaac Singer’s “Enemies, A Love Story”.
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11 Comments
ic:Won’t it be too un-pc for the Academy?
Nov 26, 2006 - 7:33 pm bdg:Excellent point about Balmoral that I had not considered. It is literally and figuratively the sanctuary of a painfully introverted woman-outside its gates, she’s under constant scrutiny. In fact, there is a scene at the Balmoral gates that explicitly dramatizes the climax of Elizabeth’s struggle as she emerges to take up her public performance.
A straightforward but amazingly sympathetic portrait of a most peculiar institution as well as the flesh-and-blueblood human being who has devoted her entire life to it.
Nov 26, 2006 - 9:53 pm Orson:I have not read any reviews yet, other than Rogers. But yours is a fine place to start.
Until seeing “The Queen,” I’d forgotten how righteously anti-Monarchist Labor was - or at least with Blair’s generation is. Hostile” come to mind. Thus, seeing Tony transformed into a respectful co-player reveals a kind of Baptism by fire.
It’s not as though the Royals aren’t used to being diplomats. It’s just that the world of celebrity and their media saturated ways of her then much younger people caught the Queen so unaware. THIS is what’s the astonishing and dramatic pleasure in Frears and Morgan’s film.
Perhaps we could call it a time-capsule account of “the Californiacation” of the Monarchy?
Nov 26, 2006 - 11:14 pm Harold Fretheim:I have seen this movie and I know exactly what Roger means about Balmoral Castle. And this movie was about as anti-PC as could ever be imagined. A good antidote almost. By holding up the events of the week of Diana’s death we see the whole silliness of that moment.And of as queen who simply could not fathom that her people had declined to the pathetic.
Nov 27, 2006 - 12:09 am Patrick Carroll:I agree about Balmoral, but what struck me most was the contrast between QE2 and Diana.
On the one hand you have a reigning monarch with 45 years under belt, a witness to a lot of history with not a blemish on her character, committed to palying out the role she accepted as a girl. On the other, a self-involved, neurotic little thing who does what spiteful damage she can to the institution of the monarchy. The Queen’s composure does break on a couple of occasions, but mostly all we see is the kabuki mask of royalty. That has to be a tough role to play.
Beyond that, well, the Royal men (Charles, Philip) don’t come off very well. One comes across as spineless; the other as clueless. They pale by comparison with the Queen and Queen Mother.
Nov 27, 2006 - 4:53 am Jake:anyone still whining about pc is so full of it. Every bigot and fool always starts his rant about how non=pc he/she is. Right wingers are the most PC of them all, criticize some crackpot TV preacher or a fascist vet and blammo: you’re anti-God, anti-Military and un-American. Quit whining about pc nonsense, when we live in a media world dominated by psycho loudmouths
Nov 27, 2006 - 8:21 am gina:Far too PC for an oscar alas, the marvelous script too understated, no easy jokes for the ADD, no fawning over early death, just a few harrowing glimpses through the cracked carapace of the woman/institution under attack by a mob that could be a revolutionary mob. A great actress played this flick with the deceptive spontaneity of a champion tennis player, a Federer. Mirren never rushed a reaction or a line. She waited, considered and only then delivered the coup de grace.
Nov 27, 2006 - 8:27 am Jake:So now we are supposed to fret about worthless English royals? I was under the impression that we live in a democratic republic. It is the Right’s obsessive power and hero worshipping that seems to be at work here. It shows the Right’s utter contempt for true democracy in lieus of a privileged ruling class they are working to create.
Nov 27, 2006 - 9:57 am Webutante:I think it a wonderful glimpse into the family and woman we don’t often get. For me the vignettes of her outdoors, batting around in her beat-up Land Rover spoke volumes of a more human side of a woman we most often see only as Her Majesty.
Nov 27, 2006 - 10:01 am Sissy Willis:The landscape as major character. . . Perfect. Thomas Hardy would approve.
Nov 28, 2006 - 11:38 am Linda in Texas:I saw The Queen over Thanksgiving weekend and I couldn’t agree more with your review Roger. I’ve never been a “royal-watcher” myself. It was tragic for the Brits when Diana died so unexpectedly and the film brought back to me the empathy I felt for them.
The one thing I would add to all the other marvelous critiques in the comments is that I was very impressed with the casting, not only their ability to take on the character but also their appearance. It was remarkable how much they resembled the real life characters.
Nov 29, 2006 - 10:11 am