MVFF33: 'The King's Speech'

As winner of the People's Choice Award at this year's Toronto Film Festival, Tom Cooper's The King's Speech is set to become a hit with mainstream audiences in the States, as previous winners Precious and Slumdog Millionaire were before it, and owing to the performance of middle-aged heartthrob Colin Firth and of supporting actor Geoffrey Rush it will more than likely be a major presence in next year's Oscars as well. Yawn! At least with its nods to Bollywood Slumdog was fairly honest about its sugar content, but The King's Speech just pulls unremittingly on audience heartstrings without any irony whatsoever, sawing away at our pathetic fascination with well-dressed, well-meaning British gentlemen who are afflicted with an endearing touch of social anxiety but whose morals and conduct are above reproach. It's a caricature of Englishness that Colin Firth has built an entire career on. Here we find him one rung further up the ladder than usual - he is King George VI no less - but the character is essentially the same as the one he always plays, with some minor variations.
Bertie, as he is known to his friends, has a fairly debilitating speech impediment which interferes with his royal duties as Duke of York but which threatens to become overwhelming when he is suddenly catapulted to the throne in the wake of his brother Edward's abdication in 1936 (to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson). Fortunately for Bertie, his enterprising wife Elizabeth (played with predictable charm by Helena Bonham Carter) has already secured the services of unorthodox Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush), and the film is a study of their developing friendship, essentially of the ways in which Lionel manages to thaw out his heavily armored aristocratic client in time for him to embrace his royal destiny and deliver the speech of his life over national radio as Britain enters the war with Germany in 1939. You know you are in for some pretty high-calorie low-nutritional fare by the time Bertie makes his first breakthrough speech in Lionel's office, and the film continues in this vein as Bertie opens and snaps shut and opens again in the course of his treatment. It is a cleverly written and staged production, with enough humor and appropriate (superficial) questioning of privilege and class division to make us feel cosily acknowledged, but the story is chockful of that cloying sentiment which is symptomatic of emotional ill-health and is the unfortunate state of quite a few British films these days, another anodyne and intellectually-retarded exercise in winning the hearts, minds, and dollars of American audiences who don't know any better and don't want to. I enjoyed it - but not with the part of my brain that thinks.