At a Loss for Words
It’s possible that you too would develop a stammer (not the same as a stutter; look it up). And, if you were being realistic, you would probably conclude that you had got off easy.
But then, you are probably not the heir to the British (or any) throne. It’s okay. I’m not either.
True Grit hasn’t come out yet, and I don’t think there’s any way that a movie could touch the greatness of Winter’s Bone, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that The King’s Speech will go down as either the second- or third-best movie of 2010.
In 2006, Helen Mirren, then age 61, played Queen Elizabeth II; in this movie, the current queen is played by Freya Wilson, a little girl. That’s because the titular king is Elizabeth’s father, George VI—Bertie to his friends—who was forced to become king when his brother abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite.
(This sounds more romantic than it actually was. Wallis was the Paris of her day—something the movie portrays hilariously.)
Anyway, George VI (Colin Firth) actually turned out to be a very good king, whatever that means, given that he had no actual authority. But at a time (the 1930s) when radio had become a way of life for every social class, Bertie’s terrible stammer was an intensely disabling condition.
So his loving, no-nonsense wife (Helena Bonham Carter) hires Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an unqualified Australian living on the brink of poverty, to be her husband’s speech therapist.
Logue turns out to be the perfect fit, given that he’s an empathetic soul, one who’s relatively unimpressed by royalty and breathtakingly confident in his own abilities.
He makes the king curse like a sailor. They become friends. Bertie finally comes clean about the isolation he’s lived with for his entire life. So, on the eve of World War II, he was able to comfort his nation over the radio waves. Just in the nick of time.
Does this sound boring? It’s not. And that is why this movie is so brilliant. The narrow focus on the king’s stammer and his relationship with his speech therapist coalesces to bring an entire era to life. The acting could not be better.
That a movie about a dead man's stammer could be so exhilarating is testament to the fact that, in the right hands, virtually any subject can be elevated to great art. So go see it. Right now.
