Queen--the Movie

I remember vividly the events of the week ending Saturday, September 6, 1997. Princess Diana, divorced from Prince Charles only the previous year, was killed in a car accident in Paris early on the morning of August 31. This was followed by an outpouring of grief and public sentiment, manifest by thousands of bouquets of flowers placed before the Buckingham Palace gates. During this time the Royal Family, "on Holiday" at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, was nowhere to be seen. The press and thronging crowds began to grumble at what seemed to be unjustified Royal coldness toward the memory of the Princess of Wales. Finally, on September 5, the day before Diana's funeral, Queen Elizabeth appeared on television to express the Royal Family's sadness at her passing. The funeral in Westminster Abbey on September 6, beamed around the world, was attended by celebrities, actors and other friends of Diana. Footage from the funeral, shown in Queen, highlighted an irony: actors were playing the royal characters in the movie, but in the film clips, embedded in the movie, actors (such as Tom Cruise) were "playing" themselves.

Something about Diana's death even before she had reached the prime of her life seemed to evoke such an outpouring of grief that it created, for a time, a crisis in the monarchy. I still remember feeling that grief, painted on faces of people who never knew her but who nevertheless sympathized with her--possibly because she was young and beautiful, possibly because she seemingly had so many choices in life but ended up making some very bad ones, and possibly because her life, like an early flower, was nipped before it even had a chance to bud.

Aims

The aim of this film is to portray the dual worlds of the Royal Family and Tony Blair's new government in the six days between Diana's death and funeral. In a sense the film's "thesis" is quite simple: that Elizabeth, who represented the "old" or "traditional" way of doing things, was gradually convinced by Tony, who represented the "modern" way of doing things, to come (regally kicking and screaming) into the "modern" world by bending to Tony's requests that she show herself more emotionally involved in the grief of her subjects. By so portraying the two leading characters Director Stephen Frears has probably got it basically correct, though this generational difference to public displays of emotion and solidarity could be hypothesized simply by knowing the dates of birth of Tony and the Queen. While other characters are sometimes portrayed with skill (Prince Philip, played by James Cromwell), the focus of the film is on Helen Mirren's portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. That portrayal is both stunning and, surprisingly, lacking.

Portrait of a Queen

The film's epigraph is from Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II : "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown." The opening scene seems to belie that unease, as the Queen is calmly sitting for her portrait, being painted by a man who himself believes in the "old values" that no doubt inform QE II. Even though a young PM who potentially represents massive changes has recently been elected (Tony Blair), she has a rather "ho-hum" attitude toward it all. After all, Tony is just the most recent of 10 people who have asked her permission to form a government. Nothing, it seems, could shake the royal equaniminity. Helen Mirren perfectly captures the calm, even chilly, formality of the Queen.

But Diana's sudden death catches everyone off guard. As one of the Queen's men explained to new PM Tony Blair, "there is no precedent (he pronounced it PREE-ce-dent) for this event." The Queen is portrayed as a woman able to think clearly in categories, but whose categories increasingly get her into problems. She thinks: Diana is no longer royalty. Her death is therefore a private matter. In a private matter the family decides what is best to do. Her family is the Spencer family. Therefore, leave it to the Spencer's to determine what is best to do about Diana.

The very coldness of her logic is nearly her undoing. As events spin further and further out of control during the week, Mirren portrays the Queen as weakening in her resolve, becoming tentative and uncertain, buffeted back and forth by advisors, her husband and Tony Blair. Finally, in trying to get away for some peace and quiet, she stalls her 4-wheel-drive vehicle in a stream on the Balmoral grounds, whispers "bugger," sits on the hood and lets out her emotions. She looks up and sees a beautiful, regal-looking stag, which she knows will soon be killed in the hunt. We now know the truth of Shakespeare's line. The Queen is now vulnerable in ways that she thought were not possible.

Bowing to the pressure brought on her gently by Tony Blair (25% of your subjects now want to abolish the monarchy), she returns to London and walks up to the flower-festooned gate of the Palace, within touching distance of thousands of onlookers. We see her struggle, as if trying to decide whether to re-enter the "deep freeze" of the "old" Queen or "open up" to the demands and invitation of the "new" world. Finally, she faces the crowd, and talks to a little girl, who gives her, not Diana, flowers. It is a moving scene, one that perhaps even touched the Queen's heart.

Conclusion

These things make up the stunning part of the portrayal of the Queen, whether it is historically accurate or not. But the lack? I think there is more of a directoral than actress lack in the following point. Though we understand the emotional distance of Elizabeth from people (Cherie Blair described the royals as "emotionally retarded nutters") and her extreme "privateness" (after all, we all have had parents or uncles/aunts or grandparents like that), we don't really understand the forces that have shaped her. Director Frears gives us only the slightest clues as to what those forces were. In one line Tony Blair mentions "the abdication"--when the Queen's uncle, Edward VIII, left the throne in 1936, when she was ten years old, to marry the American Wallis Simpson. This was the first abdication in English history, and probably had a profound effect on her--burning into her heart the importance of the "image" of the royalty above all else. But Frears should have brought us inside her mind a bit more because, even though she skillfully plays her part, she does so without a fully capturing the audience. Well, maybe Freares wanted us to go ga-ga for Tony Blair. Everyone else was in 1997.

All in all, an entertaining and engaging movie on a riveting theme from our common past.

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