The Queen

I saw The Queen, along with a grimy, faded, near-unwatchable print of Dangerous Liasons, last week at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica with the director of both films, Stephen Frears, in attendance. (I don't know how Mr. Frears felt about seeing perhaps his most celebrated work projected in such a lamentable state. One can only hope that he made his gracious post-Q&A exit during the opening credit sequence, before the filth became too overbearing.)

It's a deft and surprising film, much more humorous than I expected, and I enjoyed it very much. So I'm not quite sure why it has taken me four days to actually write up a review...Laziness, I guess.

Frears had made a docu-drama for the BBC about the early political career of Tony Blair starring a man named Michael Sheen, who in addition to possessing a great deal of charisma and a natural presence on screen also happens to look very much like the real Prime Minister. The original project having been such a success, it was decided that Sheen would reprise his role as Blair in another film, one chronicling the week following the Parisian car crash that killed Lady Diana, ex-wife to the Prince of Wales.

So though it is titled The Queen and features an assured, sharp and rightly celebrated performance by Helen Mirren as Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, Frears' film isn't character study about one of the world's most famous monarchs. Rather, Frears and writer Peter Morgan mine human comedy from the relationship between an anxious upstart politician and the outdated relic to whom he's regrettably saddled.

In the Q&A session that followed the film last Saturday, Frears postulated that the monarchy itself may fade out after the death of Queen Elizabeth. The Queen is beloved of her subjects, but the same cannot necessarily be said for the institution she represents. It's an untenable situation, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone thinks that the monarchy has no real power, and there's no Constitution giving the monarchy any official power, then the monarchy has no power. It's almost as if Brits have decided to just let these people continue to act like royalty in order to be polite, which is a very British thing to do. After all, it would be rude to ask them to move off of their 40,000 acres now. They're old!

Frears' film cuts right to the heart of this barely-concealed tension. Blair seems to know the Queen's opinion matters as he practices the various handshakes and salutory rituals one needs to make her acquaintance, but he also knows all this pomp has no deep significance. The Queen stands for tradition, but most of her subjects seem to desire change. The Queen hates celebrities, yet stripped of powers of state, she's little more than a celebrity herself. It would be tragic if it wasn't so amusing.



Frears' insightful, craftily satirical film pivots on one central concept: the notion of an old-fashioned European monarchy co-existing with a modern representational government is stupid and ridiculous. The film opens with Tony Blair's government ascending to power in a crucial election. In accordance with tradition, the first duty of an incoming Prime Minister is to visit The Queen and ask (or, more accurately, beg) for permission to form a new government.

Blair's a modern, casual kind of guy who asks everyone he works with to call him "Tony," but he's patriotic and enthusiastic enough to accept this rather awkward, humiliating ordeal with a smile. His wife Cherie (Helen McCrory), whom the Queen's advisor (Roger Allam) calls a "staunch anti-monarchist," finds the whole affair offensive, and makes it known with her fits of giggly schoolgirl laughter and her "shallow courtsy."

Frears and Morgan eventually come down on Cherie's side of this argument, taking umbrage at the idea of nobles, elevated by nothing other than birthright, lording over civil society with their antiquated rules and petty family squabbles. Accordingly, they depict all the royals as ludicrous characters in many ways.

As the petty, strangely hostile Prince Philip, James Cromwell gets the film's biggest laughs and even works in some physical comedy. I've rarely enjoyed him more on screen. A guy I've never seen in a movie before, Alex Jennings, gives a truly brilliant performance as Prince Charles, turning him into a mawkish, weepy caricature that's somehow more human than the real Prince Charles. Sylvia Syms plays Her Majesty the Queen Mother like a boozy old broad on a sitcom, gingerly tossing out rotten advice and backhanded compliments in between healthy slugs of bourbon. They're a fun group.

Still, despite Frears' sarcastic contempt for the Royal Family and the history of oppression and elitist disdain they represent, he can't quite give himself fully over to the idea of hating them. Using mostly archival footage from the immediate aftermath of Diana's death, Frears depicts the very real and very emotional grief of the English people over the loss of an ex-royal they saw as one of their own. Surely the royals still mean something to the British people if they are capable of eliciting this kind of sadness and anger.

In fact, the negative public response to Queen Elizabeth that provides most of the conflict in The Queen comes not out of resentment or hatred for the Royal Family, but bitter disappointment. Diana, whom Tony Blair called "The People's Princess" in a press conference following her death, had clearly won the PR battle following her divorce from Prince Charles. The Royals were seen as cruel and exclusionary. Diana was not one of them, she was too "common," so they kicked her out.

When the news arrived of her death in a car crash, along with new boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed, it seemed the entire world looked to Queen Elizabeth for some sort of public statement of grief. The problem is that such a thing is simply not done. HRH takes her position very seriously. She determines her public behavior based on strict guidelines, adhering always to decorum and tradition. Kings and Queens do not make emotional public statements of grief. Loss is personal and should be handled discreetly, out of the public eye. Therefore, Diana would be mourned in a private ceremony hosted by the Spencer family, and not honored officially by her former in-laws in any way.

Unfortunately, to the British public, the total lack of response from Buckingham Palace didn't feel like traditional British stoicism ("stiff upper lip and all that..."). It felt like venom. It felt like the response of a bunch of stuck-up old crones who always hated Diana and were happy now that she was dead. (Of course, it's entirely possible that Queen Elizabeth's response is rooted in her intense personal distaste for Diana. The film makes it clear that there was no love lost between the two, even as it keeps The Queen's ultimate motivations intentionally vague.) Regardless, it appeared to the public like hatred towards Diana, which they then interpreted as hatred towards all of them. And this caused significant popularity problems for the Royal Family.

Much of the film finds Sheen's Blair making the case to Mirren's monarch for breaking tradition by allowing Diana's many fans to grieve along with the royal family in a public funeral. Fortunately, the two actors have a natural chemistry and give the various machinations and power struggles realism while still making them exaggerated for comic effect.

In their first scene, with Blair taking a knee in order to formally ask for his sovereign's blessing in forming a government, the Queen intimidates him by noting the many other Prime Ministers whom she has overseen. (She lets slip that her first PM was Winston Churchill.) Later, during a phone conversation, Blair turns the tables on HRH, strongarming her over a decision not to fly the flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace despite a public outcry. Sheen exudes certainty with his voice, assuring the Queen that this is a compromise that must be made for the sake of the monarchy, while indicating his intense anxiety only with his eyebrows.

The central metaphor of the film comes soon after, as Philip decides to distract his newly-motherless grandsons by stalking a deer that has wandered on to their property. The buck, an aging but nonetheless majestic creature, wanders near where the Queen's Land Rover has broken down on the property. They share a knowing, quiet moment before she shoos it away to save its life, and immediately you kind of get where the whole movie's going. The Queen is that deer, still running along but growing tired. But moreso, the notion of having a Queen is the deer. It had a good run, and managed some impressive feats, and certainly had a lot of fascinating tradition and pageanty and history. But the concept of royalty's time is over, like the buck, and it no longer makes a lot of sense.

Frears kind of lays this all on a bit thick, particularly towards the end of the subplot (which I won't spoil here.) It's a bit obvious and self-important, while the rest of the film is a pithy delight. Fortunately, he really doesn't make too many more missteps.

Though retelling a story from less than a decade ago, concerning people who are mostly still alive and in the public eye, Frears uses admirable restraint in connecting the events of the movie to the present day. It's a bit uncanny and odd to see a fictional movie about events of the recent past like this, but once the shock of the new wears off, the iconic and famous individuals being interpreted start to come alive in their own right, as movie characters.

I suppose the case could be made that merely by representing Blair as something of a sycophant and proxy, as someone easily dazzled and willing to be pressed into service by those in a higher station, Frears is making a contemporary political commentary. There are shadows of Blair's later PR assist to our President in his advisory role to the Queen in this film.

Frears only confronts this notion head-on once, towards the end, allowing the Queen to get in a quick dig at Tony Blair's hypothetical political fortunes in the year 2006. I think it's telling that the one time the movie sort of steps outside itself and addresses the present, it's a line of dialogue given to the Queen. She may head an organization that's no longer exactly relevant, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have any cards left to play.