The Queen in Spades
PODHORETZ, JOHN
The Queen in Spades A royal crisis and the British nervous breakdown. by John Podhoretz Ostensibly, The Queen is about the untimely and tragic death of Princess Diana in a horrible 1997 car...
...She says as much to Blair in an angry telephone conversation, but because we never see her interact in any way with William and Harry, her anger at his assertion that she should return to London seems unjustified and unreasonable...
...Rather, it's the struggle every character in the film must endure to maintain a modicum of dignity when the world is conspiring to turn them into slapstick stooges, slipping on banana peels...
...We see them only from the back, and they are the subject of much worried conversation between Elizabeth and Philip...
...As for that interment, The Queen shows, without making much of a point of it, just how undignified and comic it was, too—the unutterable kitsch of an event characterized by the presence of A-list celebrities like Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Elton John entering the august precincts of Westminster Abbey looking more like dazzled tourists than grief-stricken mourners...
...The Charles we see here is a caring father but a man so emasculated by his decades of waiting for the throne that he cannot bring himself to insist upon anything with his mother—whom he thoughtlessly wounds by praising his late wife's emotional connection to her children...
...Helen Mir-ren, who plays the queen, gives a triumphant performance that is almost certain to win her an Oscar next year precisely because she dares to do so little...
...But telling that rather dull story—in which the new prime minister Tony Blair must convince the monarch to break with the stiff-upper-lip tradition she represents precisely so that she can save the tradition of the monarchy—isn't what makes The Queen this year's most unexpectedly diverting cinematic entertainment...
...by John Podhoretz Ostensibly, The Queen is about the untimely and tragic death of Princess Diana in a horrible 1997 car crash...
...The comic tone struck by The Queen makes it an entirely new kind of docu-drama...
...Director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan made a very tasteful decision to treat Charles and Diana's sons with great discretion...
...Elizabeth is, however, the only adult member of her family who doesn't seem faintly ridiculous...
...And in her state of containment, Mirren conveys Elizabeth's towering dignity...
...Blair is clearly overmatched by Elizabeth, who has the stillness of someone who has spent her life affecting a facial expression that contains no information at all...
...Her Elizabeth isn't humorous, or wise, or condescending, or monstrous, or heroic, or loving, or warm, or cold...
...And his wife (the hilarious Helen McCrory) looks as though she is about to burst into giggles as she does a schoolgirl's curtsy...
...The first people we see doing a battle with dignity in the film are Tony and Cherie Blair, as they are ushered into Buckingham Palace for a meeting with the queen, during which she is to make the ceremonial request that Blair form the new government...
...Because it doesn't take itself too seriously, it doesn't seem to create the kinds of problems other fictionalized versions of real-world events do...
...The problem with this narrative choice, however, is that it blurs a central point about the week during which the royal family said nothing about Diana's passing: Elizabeth was concerned primarily with the well-being of her orphaned grandchildren...
...Meanwhile, Elizabeth's sour mother has, it turns out, spent a great deal of time planning her own funeral and is appalled to discover that her careful design is being hijacked for Diana's interment...
...He and his father, Philip, go out stalking a stag at the royal palace at Balmoral dressed in full Scottish regalia—which is, I'm sure, both entirely factual and completely hilarious...
...given instruction as they climb the stairs about how to behave in the "Presence"—bow the head, cross the room, bow the head again as the royal hand is extended for a quick shake...
...She is contained...
...It's the only misstep in this exceptionally clever imagining of one of the weirdest moments in recent history...
...Even in its softer and more moving moments, the movie still seems like a bit of a burlesque—a satire, albeit a very gentle one, and therefore something quite different from a disreputable work of pseudohistory...
...It therefore comes as a surprise to discover that The Queen is a comedy about the machinations surrounding the decision by Diana's former mother-in-law, HRH Elizabeth II, to offer therapized words of clearly disingenuous comfort to a British nation gone demented and hysterical in the wake of the accident...
...Blair, who is superbly inhabited by the stage actor Michael Sheen, tries to maintain his gravitas but still can't help looking like an overeager schoolboy...
...They are John Podhoretz is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 5
