Eighth in the Short Responses To Things You Must See Series
There is a reason why the first thing we see in Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech [2010] is an almost menacing close-up of a microphone. That sets the tone for the film: it will be about speech and the hurdles one had to triumph over in order to find the voice that will inform and connect people. At the time the film is set, which is that decade of troubled peacetime before World War II erupted, this newfangled technology–really an extension of the human voice–has become a necessary disruption to the ways that things have always been done. As Prince Albert’s dying father King George V wearily tells him, it was no longer enough to just sit on a horse and look like a monarch to rally a nation; with the microphone, one had to speak to them like you were a guest in the hearts of their homes. Alas for Prince Albert, who is played with convincing nobility and frailty by Colin Firth, that reality is the stuff of personal nightmare: he has a bad stutter.
In the beginning scenes of Hooper’s film, we view with increasing trepidation a demonstration of that debility: he speaks, in behalf of his father, to a huge crowd gathered for a Commonwealth event at Wembley, and as he begins to deliver the speech to a microphone in front of him, we cringe with pity and mortification. The question becomes: how do you become an effective ruler of a nation if you don’t have a voice that your people can rally around?
Fast-forward to a scene in Buckingham Palace, after the coronation of Prince Albert, now renamed King George VI, who becomes an unwilling monarch after the abdication of his brother to pursue love in a divorced woman. The family is watching a film newsreel capturing the coronation ceremonies in Westminster Abbey. When that segment ends, the reel segues quickly to a report of Hitler speaking with such animated oratorical power to the German masses. We see a magician at work: Hitler’s forceful words sounds like an opiate, and the crowd responds accordingly. The young Princess Elizabeth turns to her father and asks him: “What’s he saying?” And the king replies: “I don’t know but … he seems to be saying it rather well.”
And there you have it, the film in its thematic nutshell: the world will be won by one who has the voice. If evil is eloquent and persuasive, and the only one who can stand in its way keeps tripping over his tongue, can evil triumph? Which is why the drama of the film ultimately leads to the king’s first wartime speech–something ornate and persuasive and lasts 10 minutes for full delivery. He is to deliver it over the radio to the rest of the country, to people hanging on to his words to get a feel, if not comfort, of the challenges to come and the heroism required of them as the dark days of war loom ever closer. It is a formidable task.
But there is Lionel Logue, an Australian actor who has claims for curing people with speech defects, played with such wit by Geoffrey Rush. The film tells the story of his adventures in elocution with the future king, chronicling the unique methods they use to overcome the central debility of the story. The final speech becomes their most dramatic project, and when it comes, you will… But I won’t divulge anything more.
One has to see this brilliant film to appreciate this true story, something Mr. Hooper has done great service in the way he has directed it to a film with a heart and a unique musicality, with honors to composer Alexandre Desplat and a fine use of Beethoven’s Symphony 7 Allegretto Movement No. 2. Mr. Hooper makes us care for the people whose stories we see here, and Mr. Firth, Mr. Rush, and Ms. Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth extend that by embodying the roles with such clear-eyed empathy. We become fully invested in their dilemmas, and so when we get to the end, their triumph becomes our own as well. I have never cheered this way for a speech before, but cheer I did. You will find yourself cheering for the rest of this wonderful film as well.
Something has to be said about a film where awful people in awful circumstances doing awful things still generate a good deal of compassion and kindness despite what darkness overwhelms. Call that darkness what you will–the winter, the stark poverty, the violence, the drugs that litter this broken landscape. And yet this is as much a story of the good people do for each other in some sly, sometimes belated, way–a glimmer of humanity that remains when much has been effaced. That is what I get from Debra Granik’s painful and beautiful Winter’s Bone [2010], the unflinching story of a 17-year-old girl named Ree who lives with two small siblings and an incapacitated mother in the cold, unforgiving poverty of the Ozark Mountains. She may be young, but the gravity of a fifty-year-old lies in undercurrents in her poker face as she goes about taking care of them as much as she can, with some rare help from neighbors who are burdened with problems of their own. But one day, she gets this bad news: her imprisoned father, out on bond, seems to have disappeared and is likely unable to attend his own court hearing. His bond includes the deeds to the house and property, and if he does not show up, Ree and her family will be forced to vacate. “I’ll find him,” Ree tells the sheriff, with a grimness that speaks volumes. This is her story, a plucky girl who begins to ask uncomfortable questions, stirring the dead and the ones who want to keep their silence. She begins her search, a frightful task that includes meeting up with some unsavory characters, and bearing some bruises that are part and parcel of that search. The film centers its entire universe in the performance of Jennifer Lawrence who plays Ree with a quiet conviction that draws you in with such power. This is such a painful film to watch, and yet I stayed riveted all throughout because of her. I’m not sure I can watch this film again, but I know for sure that I am mighty glad to have seen it.
