REEL REFLECTIONS

"The King’s Speech"

A Monarch finds his Voice

Dave Greiser

Most anyone who speaks publicly for a living is familiar with the clammy anxiety of those last seconds before addressing an audience. Politicians, preachers, and actors all know that the real possibility of failure accompanies each lonely trip to the microphone.

But what if someone were forced to speak before masses of people with a pronounced stammer? And what if the setting of one’s most important speech was a moment of international crisis, an occasion that required the projection of a confident resolve before millions of people? Such was the plight of King George VI when he addressed Britain to declare war on Germany in 1939. The king’s quandary, along with the events leading up to it, is rendered with remarkable depth and emotion in the film "The King’s Speech."

The premise of this story does not suggest material for a great film. The prospect of watching someone overcome a speech impediment will not send the average movie-goer running toward the box office. "The King’s Speech" was originally a play script discovered by the rising young London filmmaker Tom Hooper. In ordinary hands, this film might have become another wordy, slowly paced BBC costume drama. In Hopper’s hands it is a tightly paced story that builds toward surprisingly deep feeling.

Credit for much of this feeling must go to the actors, of course. Colin Firth ("A Single Man," "Pride and Prejudice") portrays George VI, formerly Prince Albert ("Bertie" to his family) as a retiring career naval officer whose last desire in the world is to become king. 

Most Americans are somewhat familiar with the story of George’s flamboyant older brother Edward. Edward (played here by Guy Pearce) relinquished the throne in 1936 to marry a twice-divorced American. Up to now we have heard little about Edward’s successor, George VI, whose painful childhood included brow-beating from his royal father to "Just spit it out!" when George was unable to form his words. Firth’s stuttering in this role is more than a dramatic trick; when the king stammers before his subjects at a party, we feel his shame.

The man who wants to loosen George’s tongue and start him speaking plainly is an offbeat Australian named Lionel Logue. Logue is played by Geoffrey Rush ("Pirates of the Caribbean") as an unorthodox therapist whose techniques include reading into a recording device while listening to loud music through headphones, and shouting obscenities-which apparently most stutterers can repeat fluently. 

Rush renders Lionel Logue as a commoner who refuses to kowtow to class distinctions and insists instead on conducting his sessions with the king on a first name basis. That Logue himself is a failed actor gives him a certain empathy with his terrified client.

Helena Bonham Carter is the third indispensable player in this film. Carter plays the king’s wife (Americans know her as the "queen mum"). Though Carter began her dramatic career doing costume dramas like this one, most filmgoers identify her more readily in her quirkier roles as a witch ("Harry Potter") or an evil mortal (""Fight Club",and ""Big Fish"). Carter plays this role with a nurturing softness that suggests she is an actor of great range and subtlety.

Many period movies rely on painstakingly constructed historical sets and key scenes that are elaborately produced on a grand scale. But some of the most memorable scenes in "The King’s Speech" take place in cramped quarters that give the viewer a feeling of claustrophobia. We sense that we are inside the king’s psyche, or perhaps his tortured throat as he struggles to give voice to his thoughts.

At the film’s beginning, when Prince Albert gives a speech in Wembley Stadium to open an exhibition, we see just a portion of the crowd from under the canopy where the royal family sits. In later sequences the viewer follows behind the king, looking down narrow halls and moving through small doorways, and approaching a microphone much as a condemned person might approach an execution chamber.

The best scene in the film is the last, the climactic scene in which the king declares war. The room from which he speaks to the nation is a tiny studio with enough space for the speaker, the microphone, and the king’s therapist, to whom the king delivers his speech as though he were speaking to only one other person. The entire scene is shot in close-up, and both actors deliver a wonderful moment of intense, measured emotion.

Though I enjoy history and I often choose to see historical films I must confess to a limited appreciation for costume dramas. I think it is because the dress-up clothes and silly hats so often break the mood and remind me that I’m watching actors at work. 

In "The King’s Speech" there were few false notes to break the spell-from beginning to end. I was experiencing a story, rather than watching a movie. "The King’s Speech" offered me an opportunity to do something I was not sure was possible: to identify with a man who lives in the rarified world of royalty, and to see him as—how shall I say it?—as a man.

—Dave Greiser is a frightened public speaker who has survived 25 years in various preaching roles. His latest audience of guinea pigs is the North Baltimore Mennonite Church, in Baltimore, Maryland.