Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
God
Save the Queen?
(The Queen, 11/13/06)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Perhaps
the most impressive of Helen Mirren's recent triumphs is getting any
work at all, given that Judy Dench seems to be everywhere these days.
Judging from Hollywood casting, you'd think that Dakota Fanning, Jessica
Biel, Cate Blanchett, and Dench were the only females left on the planet.
Fortunately, the British system allows us to contemplate the existence
of more than one woman in each age class at any given time. In Stephen
Frears' The Queen, Mirren makes the most of her moment.
The Queen in this case is Elizabeth
II. The story (written by Peter Morgan) is set during a key moment in
recent British history: the summer of 1997, when the rise of the "New
Labour" government of Tony Blair coincided with the death of Princess
Diana. The newly-elected, eager Blair (Michael Sheen) presents himself
to the intimidating Elizabeth (Mirren) with all due respect for her
long tenure as the titular head of the British government. Elizabeth,
for her part, takes Blair for what he is—merely the tenth in a
line of Prime Ministers in her reign, extending back to Winston Churchill.
Their first meeting lasts a strained fifteen minutes, with Elizabeth's
coolness matched only by the anti-monarchist, shallow-curtsied contempt
of Blair's wife, Cherie (Helen McCrory).
Diana's death in a car accident
in Paris marks the beginning of the complex dance between Blair and
Bess. The Queen and her pompous husband Philip (James Cromwell) can
barely shed a tear for the free-spirited, widely-beloved Diana, who
became "ex-HRH" after her divorce from Prince Charles (Alex
Jennings). Cloaking her distaste for the Princess in British stiff-upper-lippedness,
Elizabeth refuses to make any public display of grief, even as a wave
of public mourning engulfs her small, privileged world. "Can anyone
save these people from themselves?" Blair cries, as the flowers
pile up at Buckingham Palace and the monarchy's poll numbers plummet.
As essentially a story of a PR crisis,
The Queen doesn't sound like promising material. What makes it
fascinating is the duet between Mirren and Sheen. Elizabeth, under her
frosty hair-helmet, is prodded by her savvy PM to rummage through the
royal psych for evidence of her personal humanity. Mirren makes the
search compelling and even sympathetic, wringing a kind of authenticity
from one of the most artificial personalities in the modern world.
Blair, meanwhile, enters office
with the declared intention to modernize the country. Yet he ends up
desperate to help the tin-eared Queen, begging her to end her seclusion
and save her throne. Sheen seems a bit more rodent-like than the real
Blair, but the gradual rapprochement of his character with Mirren's
is plausible and fascinating. The not-so-subtle subtext, of course,
is that the roots of Blair's complicity with the foreign policy of George
W. Bush can be found in his response to the Diana crisis.
Frear's film makes an interesting
double feature that other regnal drama out in theaters now. Where Sofia
Coppola's Marie Antoinette mixes period 1780's costumes with
1980's music, Frears intercuts his filmed story with grainy news-video
footage of the real Diana. Even more to the point, Coppola's heroine
is young and adaptable, yet is so blinkered by courtly protocol she
fails entirely to conform to her times. Frears' Elizabeth II, on the
other hand, knows exactly what is going on, but is limited by the protocols
in her own head. That young Marie loses everything while old Elizabeth
finds the strength to change comes as one of the counterintuitive—and
true—ironies of history.
©2006 Nicholas Nicastro
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