🇵🇱 Steve G 🐝’s review published on Letterboxd:
The Box Office Bashing Season: 2003 to 2014
As I've wittered on about at length numerous times before, I'm no fan of the Oscars.
However, I do think sometimes they are used as a rather lazy brickbat to beat certain films with. It seems that you can't make certain films with certain directors and certain casts backed by certain studios or producers without them immediately being labelled as 'Oscar bait'. It's a cynical and sad world we live in as film fans that there are films out there that have been made with the pure objective of winning Oscars, obviously.
But then certain films quite possibly end up as collateral damage. The King's Speech, for instance, was never going to escape that label. After all, it's about a British monarch and those always win Oscars. It's got Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Guy Pearce and Helena Bonham Carter in it. And it's distributed by The Weinstein Company. It was never going to escape that label and I blame that for the fact that I was really reluctant to watch this.
Of course, it is possible that The King's Speech is a cynical Oscar grabber. One of the main pieces of evidence people use to back this up is that it's very much fictionalised and not a completely true story. Well of course it is. It's a feature film. But whatever the intentions were for The King's Speech, it worked really well for me and was an effortlessly crafted story that was, of course, impeccably acted by all in attendance. Oh, and I don't give a shit just how much of it was fictionalised.
I felt that it was quite adept at not overdoing the parts that you expected it to overdo. Of course, Geoffrey Rush's speech therapist is portrayed as rather mischievous but not so much that he becomes a wacky miracle worker. In fact, director Tom Hooper is at pains to show that the King himself was as much responsible for coming up with a method to help him through his first wartime radio broadcast with Lionel Logue merely helping to steer him in the right direction and encourage him.
Nor is their friendship nearly as rocky in its portrayal as you would expect it to be portrayed. They have their fallings-out but actually not over the methods that Logue uses but rather, and interestingly, simply because of Logue's ignorance of protocol and how he is supposed to behave towards royalty. In many ways though, you've seen The King's Speech before and of course we all know how it ends.
Yet there is no forced effort to steer away from anything that might resemble a cliché so long as it fits well with the flow of the story. It's a very simple film very simply told and one that is packed full of humanity, humour and enjoyable 'characters'. It is, of course, quite expertly performed by a mostly British all-star cast although I doubt anyone not in the know would believe for one second that Guy Pearce was an antipodean chap considering his mastery of his accent here.
I've never done a jot of acting in my life, except when I've been lying to try and get out of work, appointments or any other social engagement that might impinge on a quieter life for yours truly. But I suspect even those who have trod the boards would find it difficult to express just what an extraordinary performance Colin Firth turns in here. It's hard enough doing someone else's voice or accent, I would imagine, but to affect one with a speech impediment and to try and faithfully reproduce that without summarily offending everyone who has such an affliction is a remarkable effort.
But I perhaps enjoyed Bonham Carter's performance even more. She finds the wonderful middle ground between officious royalty and woman of the people whilst also believably portraying a loving, supportive and understanding wife quite effortlessly. Timothy Spall's brief but brilliant portrayal of Winston Churchill has me hoping that any future films about the legendary former prime minister look no further than him when casting the lead role.
A really enjoyable and really quite lovely film, The King's Speech won't surprise you a bit but the comfort I felt watching it was probably one of its strongest charms.
