The King's Speech

Though it features the sort of rousing, uplifting score one expects for a movie about an underdog overcoming an obstacle, the dominant sonic motif in Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is a light, choked gargle, the sound of the base of the tongue splashing around the back of the throat in tremulous preparation for a performance it would like nothing more than to not give. The tongue in question belongs to Albert Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York and second in line of succession to the king of England, a man whose stammer might never had been an issue were he blessed with the good fortune to have been born before the popularization of radio.

The film opens in 1925, at the closing of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Albert's father, King George V (Michael Gambon), charges him with delivering the closing speech on radio, himself and the primary heir to the throne, Prince Edward, having already made their wireless debuts. As he arrives, his wife and their confidants reassure Albert that he will do wonderfully, but the look of fear in his eyes creates a tense mood before he even says a word. At last, aides send him in front of the microphone at the head of the stands, and all in the audience turn reverently to hear him. The pause is deafening, and when Albert finally speaks, the crackled stutters that escape his lips echo through the sound system, mocking him as the crowd maintains their respectful silence but look around uncomfortably in that way people need to make eye contact to share pain but must also avoid it at all costs to prevent an errant titter.

It's an excruciating moment, and as someone who does not stammer but has often felt the hot sting of apprehension -- no, pure, unrelenting terror -- at the simple notion of public speaking, the seemingly contradictory combination of agoraphobia and claustrophobia that creeps into the mise-en-scène rang painfully true. Of course, the damned thing about a stammer or any other display of anxiety is that, once aware that others have picked up on the trait, the sufferer can never right, spiraling further into a pit of self-revulsion and embarrassment that magnifies the first slip into a cascade of tics and halting pronunciation. The first scared pause, the dreaded "ums" and "likes," never come in one aberration. They only ever lead to more mistakes.

Humiliated by the experience, Albert tries a series of speech therapists, all of whom display a knowledge of medicine so arcane one expects them to break out leeches and suggest a blood-letting. As ashamed by the experiences of failing with countless doctors as the public performances themselves, Albert swears off speech therapy and banks on a public life held largely out of view as his father and elder brother can handle the speeches. But the king knows better. He realizes that an occasional appearance in procession with a regal wave will no longer do; with every household turning to radio for news, entertainment, and general social guidance, it is imperative that the royal family take advantage of the airwaves lest they become an inanimate relic alongside the other trinkets in their castles for fat American tourists to come marvel at year after year. "We've been reduced to the most vile and loathsome profession of all: actors," sighs the king with grim irony.

Behind Albert's back, his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), finds a middle-class therapist, one Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Whatever danger this movie was in of being a stuffy period drama is obliterated by Rush's entrance, heralded by a toilet flush before that magnificent mass of a head enters the frame and, unaware of who Elizabeth really is, makes plain, frank chat with her. His puckish grin, mischievous bow tie (and since when has a bow tie been mischievous?) and quick wit disarm the somber proceedings instantly, though it's just as amusing to see his boyish looks blanch when his upfront candor is returned in kind and Elizabeth reveals her identity and that of her husband.

The scenes between Lionel and Albert -- or Bertie, as his family (and Lionel, to his extreme annoyance) call him -- play as a tug-of-war between stale, Academy-pleasing montage of uplift and determination and something fresher, more spontaneous. Lionel insists on a first-name basis to make his therapy work, and his direct manner so stuns the royal member used to even his closest advisers speaking to him with reverence and cowed expression that he starts answering back in spite of himself. Rush's humor is infectious; Bertie tells him about the other doctors who prescribed cigarettes to relax the lungs, to which Lionel replies, "They're idiots." "They're all knighted," replies Bertie smugly. "That makes it official, then," says Lionel with a wide grin.

Rush and Firth attain an instant chemistry that shows off each individually but also creates a certain hollowness when they're apart. Rush, with his giant, triangular face, is at once boyish and refined, his elocution and perfect diction clashing with his more laid-back attitude. He plays off Firth, who once again gives a fantastic performance. Like Tilda Swinton, Firth is seemingly incapable of giving anything less than a mesmerizing performance, and he's the sort of person who can oscillate between homely and strikingly beautiful depending on they compose themselves. Firth spends most of the film contorted in mental agony, squashing his throat into a makeshift double chin as if compressing a bellow, hoping to stoke the words out of his lungs. He looks uncomfortable with the very thought of existence, his eyes darting nervously even when secluded from the public eye.

Had Hooper the confidence to stay entirely with their interplay, The King's Speech might have deserved the fevered hype that has greeted its release. But he gets mired in the cliché of the genre. His edits border on the sporadic at times, eliding over the more intimate and affecting moments to get to necessary stopgaps in plot. Bound to tell the historical narrative, Hooper must devote time to Prince Edward, a feckless, irresolute cad governed by his emotions, all of which are petulant and self-centered. Casting Guy Pearce in the role makes all the Australian jokes lobbed at Lionel throughout the film that much more amusing, but not even Pearce can work with the weakling. Nothing exposes the ludicrous nature of the monarchy like Edward's ascension and ultimate abdication of the throne: he falls in love with an American woman working on her second divorce, and his passions lead him to propose marriage. As the head of the Church of England, the king could not marry a divorcée, and what's more, neither the characters nor the people behind the camera suggest his rashness comes from true love. And so, Edward drains the film's middle section, simply occupying time until he can at last drop out and let his younger brother assume the throne.

Furthermore, Hooper and writer David Seidler get stuck with the proposition of successfully building dramatic tension to the titular speech, delivered when Britain declared war on Germany. Though Lionel features prominently and the camera spends some time in his modest domicile, this is a film that essentially roots itself in the hermetically sealed world of the monarchy, a faded, anachronistic relic that effectually ended long before the Russian tsars and German emperors mentioned nervously as Albert and others ponder the fate of the dynasty. But this creates the issues of building social tension through the group of people most oblivious to popular malaise and the nuances of international relations. After all, this monarchy sent its subjects to die en masse in the previous Great War even though they, being of inbred "pure" stock, were related to the German nobility they were meant to be opposing. The film wouldn't work if it suddenly sprang WWII on the audience without tying Albert's story to the mounting international turbulence, but it also seems clumsy for the characters to mention him only in the most terse and suggestive way possible, as they do throughout the 30s before Albert becomes George VI. Only when war is at England's doorsteps do the references to "Herr Hitler" becomes anything less than thudding moments of forced relevance in an otherwise sharp script.

The film has its other flaws. For the note-perfect work from the main cast, some of the supporting parts, though played by heavyweights border on the laughable. Timothy Spall, my dear Timothy, puts in such a bad Churchill impersonation I kept waiting for, Monty Python-style, someone to walk in from behind the camera and say, "No, stop, this has gotten far too silly." Derek Jacobi plays the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the more morally superior to hold the position, as an unctuous but snippy sycophant, wanting to be villainous without being able to twist the real man that far without snapping him from his base in reality. Long after Hooper's direction settles into its refined grace and settles the aesthetic issues near the start, these two drag down all of their scenes. Taken with some of the more obvious lines, these nagging issues too often distract from the keen, hilarious and moving double act shared by Rush and Firth and expertly moderated by Carter.

Yet if The King's Speech is ultimately unable to transcend the restrictive boundaries of its awards-baiting genre, it overcomes any disappointment by being so full of verve and energy that it at least stretches those confines to the breaking point. This is the kind of film made to show off its actors, but the main players are all so excellent that they would all deserve awards, were they given based on merit instead of marketing ability. Fortunately for the cast and crew, The King's Speech has enjoyed plenty of that as well. I do not think the term "Oscar-bait" necessarily connotes a bad film, but it does speak to the increasingly stale formula guaranteed to please the artistically conservative members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. What typically makes an Oscar-bait film unbearable is when it was clearly made to reap platitudes.

The King's Speech works because it cares for its characters and understands the symbolic but vital importance of George VI. A whole other movie could be made about the courage he and his wife displayed during the war, never leaving London even when a bomb went off at Buckingham Palace. The pauses he put into his speeches as he ensured each word came out clearly gave his voice a solemn gravity, and though his inspiration gets overlooked in favor of Churchill, George too played a key role in the war effort. Rush's Lionel looks compassionately but sternly upon his subject, aware that Albert could be a great man if he could only get over his fears. It is a testament to how well Rush goads Albert and how well Firth responds that, when the speech came at last, though I knew the ending, a tiny knot had formed in my stomach. Whatever else holds back the film, that effect was earned, and this break from the usual, priggish nature of period drama made The King's Speech an unexpected pleasure to watch.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Having re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before seeing the first half of the story in David Yates' latest, I entered the cineplex ready to dub the latest adaptation of the most popular book franchise in the world Harry Potter and the Interminable Holocaust Allegory. This would not be entirely Yates' fault, mind you; there are fundamental flaws in the story that cannot be blamed on anyone involved with the production. The problems inherent in the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are the issues inherent in J.K. Rowling's final entry (one hopes) in her wildly successful series. When I devoured the closing chapter of Harry Potter's saga as an 18-year-old leaving high school just as the most visible pop culture symbol of my childhood came to a close, I loved every page. Absorbed by the action, I plowed through 759 pages in mere hours, sad to see these characters slipping away even as I propelled myself toward the end with breakneck speed.

What I saw upon a second reading, however, was the weakest book of the series since it moved into darker territory in the third entry. Pacing problems mired the first half in directionless muck, wallowing in dystopic Holocaust/post-9/11 allegory until exposition suddenly kicked in and never let up until the end (even the epilogue, which I found deeply unsatisfactory even on the first read, summarizes the futures of the characters with banal resolution). Yates' biggest contribution to the three Potter films he's helmed has been his commitment to retaining as much as possible of the novels while still releasing films at acceptable blockbuster length. Even The Order of the Phoenix, the longest and most meandering of the books, was whittled down to one of the shortest running times of any of the franchise movies without sacrificing the core of the work.

Ergo, his decision to split Deathly Hallows into two parts speaks less to the overflow of great ideas in Rowling's epic than a misguided attempt to use the final entry to give fans what fans always want: the entire book transposed to screen. Of course, fans don't know what they want, and it's interesting that the only fully successful adaptation of Rowling's books, Prisoner of Azkaban, owes its power to sacrificing the familiar plot elements to reach for a more magical and unpredictable atmosphere. There's nothing of the sort to be found in Yates' films, which suck the feeling of wonder from Hogwarts -- this was particularly evident in The Half-Blood Prince, which intriguingly dug beneath the oppressive and despairing tone of Rowling's best novel to find the feeling of appreciation and nostalgia for that which will soon be lost in the coming war, only to bungle this fascinating insight with a drab visual style.

I say all of this negative stuff to come to a surprising conclusion: David Yates got it right this time. More than that, he corrected what has been horribly wrong with the film franchise. If the director's defining trademark on the series so far was to ably cut down on excess while getting the story across unscathed, he proves by giving himself the space to breathe that, while he is still not cut out for the magical side of Harry Potter, he is abundantly capable of doing the one thing that no previous Potter film has managed: delve into the characters.

Whether shackled to the plot or simply under the impression that everyone had already read the books and thus did not need introduction nor updates on the characters, Harry, Ron and Hermione have often felt like spectators in their own saga, ushered from setpiece to setpiece before being made to deliver some line about the necessity of getting some Macguffin, the red herring that is Severus Snape and/or the importance of friendship, usually in the most breathless manner possible (Emma Watson in particular has always spoken her lines as if a mule kicked her in the stomach before the director yelled "Action!"). Here, however, Yates uses his spare running time to focus on the characters, and if Deathly Hallows Part 1 is about anything, it's about how these three young adults react to the horrifying situation in which they find themselves, a predicament so dire that even these battle-tested youths feel hopeless and directionless when confronted with it.

Undoubtedly aiding Yates and his aversion to the more mystical side of the mythos is the fact that Deathly Hallows is by some measure Rowling's most straightforward book, even if it is a tangled web of exposition. More indebted to Lord of the Rings than anything, the final book relies on an epic sweep of action to make up for a confounding and unsatisfying explanation for the final battle and heavy exposition throughout. Its emphasis on Holocaust imagery allows Yates to finally apply his more standard visuals to great usage, managing to turn a color palette that consists primarily of grays and grayer grays into something expressive.

So how does Harry Potter and the List of Schindler turn out? From the opening moments, as the sound of rusting and shrieking metal builds over a black screen before violently cutting out as the screen flashes an extreme close-up (the young woman in front of me actually dropped her popcorn tub in shock at this moment), Yates does a spectacular job of creating a sense of extreme discomfort, using Alexandre Desplat's dissonant score to keep you on edge even when the characters are sitting in a home. Nowhere is safe, no one can be trusted and it's only a matter of time before Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) uses his new control over the Ministry of Magic to track down his prey.

What, then, is a chosen one to do? After unloading a heaping pile of angst onto the audience with the film installment and indulging in puppy-dog teen romance with the sixth, Harry Potter and the Seven Beauties throws young adults into the real world, and the idea that Rowling plundered imagery from the most catastrophic event of modern times is a shrewd statement on how jarring true adulthood can be for increasingly sheltered youth. There are a few light chuckles to be found here as Rupert Grint continues his adorable "aw shucks" goofiness as Ron, but the dominant mood here is one of horror. Every time the kids manage to teleport themselves away from a fight, someone else finds them, and it's a wonder any of their hearts ever stop racing enough for them to sleep. After being decently entertained by the fourth film, bored by the fifth and frustrated by the misplaced emotional focus of the sixth, I was suddenly riveted. I even wanted to cover my eyes at times, so shaken by the world collapsing around these characters.

Mind you, there are a number of stumbling blocks in the film. For all the skill with which Yates handles the downtime, Harry Potter and the Boy in the Striped Pajamas still drags on far too long. A good 20 minutes could and should have been excised from the film for better flow. The gag of Harry's friends using Polyjuice Potion to disguise themselves as him to become decoys leads to some painfully unfunny humor too quickly out of the gate. Moreover, the dialogue in and around this scene is shamelessly expository, recalling not only moments from previous films but bits that were cut from the books for time. Another holdover from the book, Ron's petulant attitude toward the other two, is tired by this point: Rowling had so exhausted Ron's jealousy of Harry by the seventh book that she had to use the MacGuffin of the Horcrux, one of the seven enchanted objects that holds a piece of Voldemort's tattered soul, to bring out that tension again. At least Grint sells it well, and as much as this sort of thing brings back the angst that Rowling and the filmmakers separately beat to death with the fifth installment.

Actually, let's talk about that acting. I've always felt bad for the child actors in this series, forced to grow up and look talented when blanketed by, you know, every major story in modern British film. Still, they've never excelled, and Radcliffe in particular has never proven himself a star. Whether the result of maturation or the desire to go out with a bang, the three principal actors have dug deep and found a well of talent from which they'd not previously drawn. When Grint goes into his jealous fit, his eyes terrified me; I honestly thought he might lunge for not just Harry but Hermione as well. Watson tones down the histrionics and drops the endearingly nerdy side to tap into Hermione's insecurities at being the child of two Muggle parents, a fear exacerbated in the pureblood frenzy engendered by Voldemort (whose own blood is "tainted" with Muggle non-magic just as rumors abound to this day that Jews nested in Hitler's family tree). As for Radcliffe, he's come a long way from the boy who agonizingly ruined the terrifying revelation of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's return in The Goblet of Fire.

Yet these deepened insights come not from me-time showboating but group interplay. The way the three characters play off each other brings out these new traits, and for the first time all are developed in equal measure. Yates inserts a scene that was not in the book, placed after Ron, corrupted by the Horcrux, leaves his friends to try and find his family. As a devastated Hermione hugs a radio, Nick Cave's "O Children" comes on, and Harry, aware that they might both die at any second, extends a hand to his second-oldest friend and the two share a cathartic slow dance. This sequence is so ingenious, so well-executed and so planned-ahead for a later vision of Harry and Hermione kissing that torments the addled Ron that Rowling should call up Yates and writer Steve Kloves and thank them for improving her work.

When the action picks up, its more straightforward style allows Yates to focus less on the awe of a magical duel than the sheer terror of being hunted. After that failed lighthearted scene with the Harry duplicates, the Death Eater ambush that awaits the gang as they move to a safehouse is fantastically executed, harrowing and bewildering in the sudden assault. Harry Potter and the Day the Clown Cried even throws in a noble death that has already inspired various "Never Forget" messages and is a surprisingly tear-jerking moment considering the character in question hasn't shown up in the film series since The Chamber of Secrets. Even when Yates gets a bit too frenetic with a forest chase sequence, the action here is exhilarating and the kind of stuff that makes you grab your seat arm tighter. I also adored a brief animated sequence used to provide background on the titular deathly hallows, a bit of Gothic shadow puppetry that is as dark as anything in the film proper. Ben Hibon, who designed and directed this segment, went all out to make a haunting piece that resembles a sort of Slavic woodcarving of an old fairy tale, the kind that made even the happy endings fatalistic.

Naturally, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I feels incomplete, the setup to a finale that won't come until May of next year. But if having to wait six months is the price to pay for a Harry Potter film that finally passes muster, it's worth it. Previous films have used that who's-who supporting cast as a crutch, cutting to one of Alan Rickman's deliciously drawled one-liners or Maggie Smith's pert, slightly condescending humanism. Here, there's no one to distract from the principal cast, who are working without a net. They succeed beyond my wildest expectations, and after debating whether to see this at all or just wait until I unethusiastically double-bill the two parts of the film in May to break myself of the mediocre imagining of a key part of my childhood, I am thrilled that everyone involved finally got it right. The previous top dog of the films, The Prisoner of Azkaban, had the magic but not the story. This film, which lacks the magic by design, balances the visual impact with solid, if imperfect, storytelling, and it's all buoyed by terrific acting. Who could have guessed that the film to break Hollywood of its string of mediocre, audience-insulting blockbusters this year would be the latest entry in one of the most mediocre and audience-insulting blockbuster franchises of recent years?