It is now the tenth anniversary of the week between the hideous death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her internationally telecast funeral in Westminster Abbey. And Tony Blair who had just become Prime Minister then has relinquished the office. Having just read Tina Brown's Diana Chronicles, which did much to explain to me why the "royals" acted as they did, I turned to the docudrama Stephen Frears directed last year about the week from the perspective of Balmoral Castle (the huge Windsor estate summer home in Scotland) and Number 10 Downing Street (the official residence of the Prime Minister).

Helen Mirren won an Oscar and many other awards in the title role. I've been a Helen Mirren fan since at least the first PBS telecast of the first Prime Suspect, and thought that her performance as Elizabeth II deserved all the accolades it has received. I don't know how the queen sounds in private, but in the scene of addressing her subjects, Mirren sounded like the queen. I wonder if the current head of the Windsor firm is as intelligent and has as refined a sense of irony as Mirren and as Prunella Scales in "Question of Attribution" make it appear, but the sense of duty to playing a dignified role that Mirren shows is clearly accurate.

"Accurate" is a dangerous standard for judging a melodrama, but with the inclusion of so much media coverage of "the people's princess" and the remote royal family, the film is more a take on history than, say, Shakespeare's "history plays" about kings who were long dead when he wrote. The movie does not show the havoc that the living Diana wrought on the Firm. Prince Philip probably really is churlish, but motivation for the "What did she do now?" irritation depends on the viewer knowing about the cooperation of the princess with the tabloid press, etc.

Prince Charles is shown to be much more sensitive to the popular perception of royals' insensitivity than his parents and Prince Philip is shown as focused on keeping his grandsons active outdoors, while Tony Blair attempts to convey the pulse of the people to the monarch. This all seems accurate and works dramatically.

In making the cross-pressures of her socialization to selfless duty and Diana as the "queen of the people's hearts" (Diana's own phrase, which is looped into the movie) wearing her heart (or at least a part of her heart) on her sleeve, Elizabeth II comes across as a sympathetic figure trying to do the right thing. When she returns to London and gets out to look at the bouquets engulfing Buckingham Palace (more than a few with notes slamming her), Mirren registers hurt. Then in a fit of self-abnegation, she offers to lay a bouquet that a young girl is holding on the pile. Although it made me think of Frank Capra, Mirren's smile when the girl tells her that the flowers are for her is a great moment.

The dramas of the funeral itself and of Prince Philip bucking up the young princes walking behind the casket are also foregone, but there is another riveting moment when the queen tells the prime minister that his office and the adoration of the throngs will end. Blair still occupied 10 Downing when the film was made, but his embrace of the disastrous Cheney-Bush Iraq misadventure had eroded his popularity and his party's majority by then (and now he's moved out).

Mirren looks more like the queen than like Helen Mirren. Michael Sheen (Bright Young Things, Kingdom of Heaven) looks like Tony Blair even when he isn't playing him. Mirren is so great that viewers have tended to see Sheen as impersonating Blair, but he turns in a rounded performance of the prime minister riding into power with a landslide and almost immediately faced with a toxic combination of constitutional crisis and media crisis.

James Cromwell (Babe, Tales of the City) looks and sounds less like the personage he is playing (Prince Philip) than Mirren and Sheen do, but makes the character believable (as well as accurate so far as the superficial writing of the character goes).Sylvia Sims is (as she points out in the "making of" featurette) bigger than the Queen Mother was, but also turns in a credible performance (so far as...). Alex Jenning (Babel) does not have the Dumbo ears of Prince Charles, but shows his discomfort.

The "making of" featurette on the DVD is average--mildly interesting but adding little, except for a reminder of the difference between how Mirren looks and talks as herself and how she looked and talked as Elizabeth Regina. I did not have time to listen to either of the commentary tracks (one from the film's historian advisor, Robert Lacey, one with director and screenwriter, Peter Morgan, who also wrote "The Last King of Scotland," so that both best acting Oscars last year went to those playing heads of state in his screenplays).

All in all, I think "The Queen" is a fairly compelling drama with particularly outstanding performances by Mirren, Sheen, and Helen McCrory (who played the mother of Heath Ledger's Casanova) as Cherie Blair (I have no sense of the real Mrs. Blair, but McCrory is an entertaining anti-monarchist in the film).

After nodding to the range of Stephen Frears's film projects ("The Queen" is quite a departure from "Dirty Pretty Things" or "My Beautiful Laundrette," if less of one from "Dangerous Liaisons" and "The Grifters"), I have to note that although the queen said she was remaining in the royal vacation home at Balmoral to comfort her grandsons who had just lost their mother, there are no scenes of her with them. The emotional detachment from her own children (not just the heir to the throne, Prince Charles) was central to Diana's critique of the House of Windsor (and it seems that both Prince Charles and Prince Philip have devoted more time and attention to Diana's sons, princes William and Harry, that Philip or Elizabeth did to Charles and his siblings. This (I think historically accurate) lack of grandmothering inadvertently (I think) undercuts making the queen seem more human[e].

And as for whether the queen has watched "The Queen." If not, she has certainly read about it. The official line is that she has no wish to look at the worst week of her life in a movie. I think that Tina Brown is right that the Windsor press officials only deny something if it's true.

And, although the movie is historically accurate in indicating that many people blamed the press for chasing Diana to death--and the largely successful tactic of the press in making the absence of comment from the queen the issue--my own cold-water dash of reality (following my reading of Tina Brown's book) is to point out (1) that Diana would have survived if she had buckled her seatbelt and (2) that the driver of the getaway car was unqualified for the job apart from being intoxicated. That is, neither the papparazi nor the Windsors were directly responsible for the death of "the people's princess."

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© 2007, Stephen O. Murray

Some may find the queen here endearingly English (stoic, for sure), so my review is aimed at joining the bouquets in Barbara's French/English writeoff.




Recommended:
Yes

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