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THE QUEEN
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Two enormous hazards face The Queen's director, Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette): British libel law and the vortex of opinion around Diana, deceased former Princess of Wales. Each in its way threatens to sink his effort to make Elizabeth II a rounded, feeling character, for he chose as his story line the week following Diana's death, when the Great British Public went into a paroxysm of grief that both beatified Diana (culminating in her brother's hagiographic, accusatory, and tasteless eulogy) and demanded that the Queen grieve publicly -- one thing that everything in her breeding, protocol, and personality trained her not to do.
Hinting at feelings superbly masked would be impossible in a stage play, where gesture and declamation are required to carry ideas to the uppermost balcony; in a film, the camera can zoom into tight closeup, the sound man can dial up the whispering wind, and the lines of mileage in an experienced face can flex and shift and convey a great deal of sympathy and somber wisdom -- a role suitable for an actress with intelligence, brio, and a bit of vinegar, like Dame Helen Mirren (Age Of Consent; O Lucky Man; Prime Suspect).
From first to last this is her film, as she's onscreen almost the entire time, and in her life she's the center of decision. Prince Phillip (James Cromwell, Revenge of the Nerds, L A Confidential) delivers a tightly bounded performance as gruff stiff-upper-lip dim Prince Philip her husband, appalled that traditional privilege is insufficiently respected in this country: "It's not fair!" "Yes," -- primly, descending the staircase in her sensible heavy brown shows, "and no further discussion is required."
Similarly, Alex Jennings (Wings of the Dove) is a lip-biting grimacing hand-wringer as Prince Charles (who has his personal assistant call the Prime Minister to relay the single sentence, "The prince feels that you and he are modern men," as Charles quivers just out of earshot. Later we have this wonderful exchange, as the Queen is jouncing her Land Rover across her 40,000-acre estate at Balmoral, with Charles in the passenger seat:
"Why do they hate us?" -- crocodile anguish.
"Not us."
-- watching the rutty dirt road and wrestling the wheel.
"What?"
-- head swivels, aghast.
"Mm." -- with a tiny head tilt, eyes never
leaving
the road.
Strong old women are too little shown in fiction and film -- we have no distaff equivalent of Lear, except in historical queens like Elizabeth I (also played by Helen Mirren in a recent TV movie). As Lear has young female trusting Cordelia, for dramatic counterpoise Elizabeth II needs someone male, young, callow, and egalitarian.
Enter grinning peppy call-me-Tony Blair (Michael Sheen, Wilde), arriving at Buckingham Palace for advice in protocol (how to bow, how to exit the room) and elocution ("Ma'am as in ham, not ma'am as in farm"), thence to be ushered into the Presence and seated on a sofa, where the Queen informs him, "You are my tenth prime minister. Mr. Churchill was my first. He sat right there where you're sitting."
That continuity of lineage, that lifeline to a past
that we
experience only through fiction, comes through as a recurring shock to
us. At
54 years and counting, Elizabeth II is
This to Elizabeth is anathema. Her great-grandmother was Victoria; she remembers Edward VIII's abdication, for he was her uncle and it elevated her father (and thus her) to the throne -- and to hear her tell it, in one of the private and hence deeply emotional moments she allows herself, the Abdication killed her father. She treats public expression as one would a cobra, swift-striking and deadly and to be held at a distance. In 1997, this cannot stand against the cow-eyed camera-loving glamorous Diana, the "people's princess" even after divorce. As Disraeli's government needed to cajole Victoria back into the public eye, Blair takes on the role of emotional Henry Higgins, teaching his housecoat-and-scarf Pygmalion that even if she cannot weep for their zoom lenses, she can read their cards, nod as they curtsey, and take a bunch of flowers from a downcast little girl. This unusual political intergenerational romance culminates when Blair shouts at his ultra-cynical media secretary Alistair, "don't you see, she's having to grieve for someone who spent the last five years twenty-four-seven trying to destroy everything she holds most dear!"
The challenge in portraying real figures is to make what we infer about their personalities both sympathetic and believable based on what we know of their words and deeds. It's made doubly more difficult where the figure is both alive and taciturn. It is Helen Mirren's triumph, and the movie's absorbing success, that what we see on the screen is not an actress owning a part, but a part owning the actress.