The King’s Speech
Director Tom Hooper has done a wonderful job making a man whose own family frustrated and tortured realise his true potential. In reality Albert, Duke of York and later King George VI was a stammerer and a traumatised, relucant monarch who was bullied by his brothers and father, starved by his nanny, more or less ignored by his mother and fitted with metal splints to cure his knock knees.
The movie is beautifully made with a richness to the colours used when Albert emerges from relative obscurity to become king and a clever use of rooms, walls, household objects and the like to create meaning. The voice was quickly becoming essential in being an effective monarch because of advances in technology. This was bad news for Albert who had a terrible fear of microphones and whose stammer was largely pyschosomatic. In one scene his old father stands over him while he tries to record a speech and loses his patience and shouts unhelpful advice like, “Relax!” “Get it out, boy!” and “Do it!” Needless to say, Albert just crumbles.
But Lionel Logue, an Australian elocution teacher, understands something that some of the knighted doctors treating Bertie don’t – that stammering is largely, if not exclusively, an emotional condition suffered by soldiers with shell shock and monarchs who refuse to believe in their own greatness. Lionel is more of a counsellor than a voice therapist; he’s not even a doctor, something Bertie only finds out late into the film. But he has experience and he convinces Bertie that experience is what matters in any craft, that and skill. He takes the dread out of becoming king and allows Bertie to believe that it is something he can do, that he doesn’t have to be imprisoned by the fear he felt when he was five years old.
As well as being a great story of overcoming seemingly impossible odds, the movie is technically very skilfully made. The motif of airplanes is cleverly used to make comments about our potential and the sense of colour in our lives; the slaughtered pig hanging in the basement at Balmoral Castle denotes the Nazi occupation of Europe; the Silvertone voice recorder cuts into the record as Bertie reads from Shakespeare and makes his mark, even if he is not aware as yet; the sense of theatre in Westminster Abbey is what Lionel craves; the portrait of Raleigh on the wall; the big, dominant telephones on Baldwin’s desk; the microphones that look like bombs at the start and celestial orbs toward the end – it all provides a rich fabric from which to draw delight and of course meaning.
It’s also a very well-written movie and there’re some fabulous exchanges between Logue and Bertie in particular. When Logue sits brazenly in the coronation seat, Bertie is apopleptic – but articulate: “Because I have a voice!!” he roars. “Yes you do,” says Logue calmly. What a powerful moment. Much earlier we see Bertie insult Logue personally and ethnically in the park referring to him as a “jackaroo” and a “nobody” but Logue’s face, while exhibiting inevitable hurt is simultaneously full of compassion for a man he admires greatly.
The scene where Bertie cries and with a depth of frustration and fear (that probably even surprised Firth himself) groans, “I am not a king,” is one that can’t fail to bother even the hairiest and beer-loving Neanderthals.
With a great script by David Seidler based on a wonderful book by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi, an exemplary cast and a skilled director, “The King’s Speech” is a highly-recommended family movie that teaches us the values of tradition, pride in ourselves, work and dedication and that the brave and tenacious are to be honoured. Dare I say – the word is “duty.”
R.H.