THE QUEEN

by Kevin Koehler

Though released theatrical, The Queen is basically a television movie, insomuch as the ripped-from-the-headlines material and execution feels like something that would be developed for the small screen.  It’s also a television movie because its famous characters – the British Royal Family - are always watching television, sometimes themselves on television.  When they’re not watching television, they’re reading the newspaper.  Multiple newspapers, actually, like the Mirror, the Sun, and the Daily Mail.  Their faces are often on the cover.  They also talk on the phone a lot, about what they’ve seen on television and read in their newspapers.  No one leaves the house much.  When they do, they hunt.

The picture opens in 1997 with a quote from Shakespeare: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”  In this case, the titular queen, Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren), sleeps quite fine, thank you, until “modernizer” Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) is elected Prime Minister.  She regrets her inability to cast a vote against him; Monarchs, alas, cannot be partial.  “You may not be allowed to vote,” says her portrait painter, “but it is your government.”  “Yes, I suppose that is some consolation.”

Then Princess Diana dies. It seems she just wanted to be left alone by the press to do the things wealthy people like to do, like sailing around on yachts with other wealthy people and raising landmine awareness, but fame isn’t a faucet you can just turn off.  A traffic accident involving Parisian paparazzi on motorcycles ends her life; the interplay of photographs, archival footage, and reenacted depictions is certainly the most effective, pathos-saturated sequence of the film.  The Queen blames Diana’s attention-seeking.  Many, perhaps unfairly, perhaps not, blame the Queen.

Diana was, of course, beloved by the British people; Blair (or rather, his speech writer) calls her “the People’s Princess” and it sticks.  The Royal Family is unprepared for the great public outpouring of grief, being as the tears are over a person they didn’t particularly like.  “What was she doing in Paris?" asks Prince Philip (James Cromwell).  “You know what she’s like.” says the Queen.  Her sister is chafed at having to abbreviate her Tuscan holiday.  Her mother resents having her own future funeral plans appropriated.  Encased in a royal cocoon/tomb (a provincial Scottish estate) far away from London, their perceived/actual lack of sensitivity to Diana’s death is a public relation’s fiasco; where Henry IV may have worried about being poisoned in his sleep, now Elizabeth and her indolent sessile consorts fear a mob of angry commoners will take their toys away.

Much of what follows is Blair’s Cassandra struggle to save the Queen from herself (even if his motives aren’t entirely selfless), set as she is on destroying any good will that exists between crown and subject.  Frears’ picture is relentlessly insular, largely in the way Sofia Coppola’s tale of another sequestered monarch (Marie Antoinette) was.  To his credit, Frears doesn’t try to solicit too much sympathy for his Queen, but the film goes down the navel-gazing rabbit hole just the same.  But where Antoinette at least had the excitement of youth, Elizabeth II spends her days much like my own grandmother does: in front of the boob tube with her bifocals on, albeit with a servant there to change the channel.  The myopic perspective of inbred elites – those whose sole interaction with the people they “represent” comes through tabloids and television - is a fine theme for a film.  It just doesn’t make for compelling narrative viewing; nor does adapting a screenplay that mistakes relentless, awkward exposition for dialogue, and ham-handed symbolism (between Diana and a prize stag the royals hunt) for insightful social commentary.

“Show Us There’s a Heart in the House of Windsor” reads one headline.  Blair asks them to make a public appearance with the reasoning “it would be a great comfort to your people and would help them with their grief.”  But why does anyone care?  What makes the Royals so important to the British people?  If the object of the film is to demonstrate the absurdity of inherited privilege, than it’s quite successful (one need only watch the Queen drive a car and speak on a cellular phone – haven’t we progressed past this?).  However, it’s also redundant and masturbatory to anyone not living in a monarchy, where people who don’t pay the Windsors millions of dollars just so you can point mock them when they make mistakes, cry when they die.

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.