Movie Review: THE QUEEN

I have very mixed feelings about this movie. I went alone, so I haven't had anyone to discuss it with. All I know is that I came home and watched First Blood - I had never seen a Rambo movie before - and I thought it was waaaaay better than The Queen. But is it really fair to compare John Rambo to the Queen of England?

But for now let's just talk about The Queen...

I took my backrow seat, stuffed receipts in my ears*, and thus began the film.

Without giving anything away, because there's nothing to give away, the basic plot is: Tony Blair is new to office, Princess Di is killed a few shorts months later, and what we experience is the ensuing interaction between Blair and the royal family, in regards to how the figureheads should react toward Di's death. We never see Diana, except for a glimpse of blonde hair diving into the car right before her crash. We see just a few short seconds of an intense car/motorcycle chase, and right before the infamous crash the scene changes. I think that was a smart move - throughout the film we only see Diana in terms of newsreels after her death. The newsreels are seamlessly pieced into the real time of the film, and it's brilliant that we are never introduced to her as a character. She is the catalyst for the action of the film, but it isn't about her. The music was also brilliant - it was absolutely perfect throughout the entire film, setting the right mood and tempo for each scene.

Great music, great solution to inserting Diana into the story.

What wasn't great was the fact that the characters were over the top caricatures of themselves. The Queen was portrayed as a cruel, cold, heartless bitch. Her husband, Prince Philip, was a fairly domineering emotionless ass. Prince Charles? Well I'll get to him in a minute. The Queen Mother was a lot like Aunt Bethany, the loon who put cat food in the jello mold in Christmas Vacation. Tony Blair was a sincere, benevolent, thoughtful, compassionate, unpolished oaf. And his wife was a bumbling idiot. Put all this together and it sounds like the good earmarks of a comedy, right? Well, yes there were many funny parts in the movie. So many, in fact, that people were laughing in parts that were obviously meant to be for dramatic effect. Was it a comedy or a drama? I don't know. I don't THINK it was supposed to be a flat out comedy. Which is why I have mixed feelings about it. It was sort of weird.

Now to Prince Charles. There's this thing called willing suspension of disbelief. And in order for me believe a character that is based on a real person, one or more of the following three things must happen. The actor must a)look like the person they are portraying, b)have the same mannerisms as the person they are portraying, and/or c)sound like the person they are portraying. The dude who played Prince Charles didn't look, sound, or act anything like him. In fact, he looked a lot like a Spencer (one of Diana's folks.) The actor in question sqwunched up his face in a contorted way and every once in a while I could see a slight resemblance to Charles in his brow. But the nose was WAAAAAY different than the honker Charles has - and that is quite easily remedied with prosthetics. If Nicole Kidman can wear a fake nose for a role, surely this guy could. So I never ever experienced the willing suspension of disbelief with Charles. I am embarassed to admit it, but I've seen several made-for-tv Charles and Di movies, and all the Charleses in those were a hundred times more convincing.

You know who WAS convincing? Helen Mirren. She was the perfect actress for the role of the Queen. And the guy who played Tony Blair had a rather uncanny likeness to him. But I just don't get the characters. I mean, Blair appeared to live in a run down tiny working-class flat, which was rather unbelievable. And the Queen was broken up over a fourteen point buck getting shot by a hunter, but she wasn't the least bit remorseful over Diana's death. I really want to know how much of this was based on reality and how much was fiction.

I'm not really sure what the point of the film was. I don't know what the filmmakers were going for. I don't think we're supposed to come away hating the Queen and loving Blair. But you know what's going through my mind? I've seen old footage of Beatles concerts where the crowd would sing "We love you Paul, oh yes we do, we love you Paul, it's true. We love you Paul oh yes we do! Oh Paul, we love you!" And so I want to sing the same thing, insert "Tony."

Helen Mirren deserves the nominations and awards. She was a great stodgy, cold, disengaged person of privelege.

And that's all I have to say about The Queen. Grade? 85.

*I have some Obsessive Compulsive tendencies and when I hear popcorn crunching my mind picks out and embellishes that sound so that it's all I can hear. So I sit in the back of theatres in order for the open mouths to be facing away from me. And I crumple up receipts or napkins or whatever I can find to stuff in my ears in order to block out residual popcorn crunching sound.