‘The Queen’ seems to have started this inside look at the royal family and ‘The Kings Speech’ continues that tradition not long after Emily Blunt’s ‘Young Victoria’. All three are very fine films and a more jaded person would think that The Kings Speech was an insiders joke of all the aspects that make for a true Academy Award friendly film. Even a speech impediment counts as a handicap in the Academy’s eyes, except for someone like Don Murphy, who’s rather wise and cynical with things like that.
Director Tom Hooper (“The Damned United,” HBO’s Emmy-winning “John Adams”) and writer David Seidler seem to have worked to give mainstream audiences what they can understand and relate too, in other words, high art that’s served up to the masses so as not to make people feel they’re back in school getting a history lesson. What The Kinds Speech boils down to is a buddy film with Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush.
The ever adapting and wonderful Colin Firth stars as King George VI, the current Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather. A quiet man never expecting to wear the crown (his elder brother was next in line played by Guy Pierce who’s quite the playboy), he was also crippled by a serious stutter, a speech impediment that kept him from succeeding in the few royal duties he was expected to perform. His wife, gloriously played by Helena Bonham Carter, discovers the most unique of therapists, an Australian part-time actor named Lionel Logue. As embodied by the amazing Geoffrey Rush, Logue is a force of nature who becomes not just the key to the King’s confidence, he becomes the King’s confidant, as well. It was a remarkable relationship, told beautifully here.
