Film Review | The Queen (2006)

Royal Flush

by Thomas Delapa


All hail Helen Mirren in The Queen. As Queen Elizabeth II, Mirren gives a commanding performance that cries out for an Oscar, if not a star-studded crown.

In director Stephen Frears' uncommonly fine docudrama, we're transported to the court of the Queen of England in 1997, during the upheaval surrounding the death of Princess Diana. Playing opposite the queen as loyal foil is Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), the newly elected Labor Prime Minister.

Mixing People magazine and Shakespearean people, Peter Morgan's juicy script aims to please, but it does so with appropriate pomp and circumstance. Bows and curtsies are in order for Frears' superbly directed cast, from Mirren and Sheen to American actor James Cromwell as Prince Phillip and Helen McCrory as Blair's cheeky wife, Cherie.

Frears begins his stately procession in May 1997 with the election of "Just call me Tony" Blair and his gingerly arrival at Balmoral Castle to receive the official blessing of the queen. Though the queen views her role in a constitutional monarchy as one to "advise and warn" the government, the events of the subsequent months flip the positions. With the shocking, paparazzi-caused death of Diana in a Paris auto accident, it is the House of Windsor that teeters on the brink of collapse. Following the 1996 divorce of Diana from Prince Charles, the royal family closed ranks, treating the former Princess of Wales like a pauper. Cherie Blair is more blunt: The queen "hated her guts."

If the clash between old and new is at the gilded heart of Frears' drama, Mirren provides its blue-blooded pulse. Never just an impersonation—though Mirren does that with aplomb—her performance grants the queen a heart and soul, however rooted they are in the musty Victorian era. Appalled at the public outpouring of grief at the death of the "peoples' princess," the queen is assuredly not amused. Leading with her stiff upper lip in the Brit tradition, the queen insists that Diana be mourned "quietly, with dignity."

Secluded at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, the royal family goes into a siege mode befitting Macbeth at Dunsinane. Prince Philip, fuming with snobbish disdain toward his people, would rather be hunting. Prince Charles (Alex Jennings), acutely aware of his sinking image, timidly makes requests of his mum to honor Diana in death.

Considering the princely exchanges between Mirren and Sheen (who previously played Blair on British TV), The Queen ascends to greatness in its quietest moments. In one of Morgan's invented scenes, Elizabeth is dumbstruck by the sight of a regal 14-point stag on her estate. That sobering moment is bettered by the queen's humbling trip to Diana's former palace, as a bow to public outcry. In both scenes, the silence evokes a touching sense of majesty.

Ultimately, it is Blair, not the queen, who provides the London bridge between modernity and tradition. Initially, he brashly sees the queen as a dinosaur, fit only for a wax museum. But it is Blair who brilliantly maneuvers his queen into a face-saving move that may have also saved the monarchy from dissolution. Blair's compromise perhaps gives an insight into his rash (some say, toady) expedience vis-a-vis his decision to ally with America in the Iraq War.

Given Frears' previous populist-minded films (like Dirty Pretty Things), it's not surprising that he'd paint an unflattering portrait of the royal family. But with Dame Helen on the throne in The Queen, one thing is for sure: She rules.

--------------
Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 10/19/06

Film Review | The Last Station

Moscow on the Thames & Hudson

by Thomas Delapa

Nearly 60 years ago, upstart film critic François Truffaut railed at what he derisively called the “tradition of quality” in French cinema. Literary-based, staid and lifeless, these were films that to Truffaut lacked “pulse.” The same ticket can be stamped for The Last Station, which goes off the tracks early and often.

Don’t let those Oscar nominations for Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer fool you. As the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, Plummer may have borrowed Charlton Heston’s Ten Commandments beard, but otherwise he’s no Slavic prophet. Mirren, meanwhile, plays Tolstoy’s nettlesome wife, Sofya, and seems to be channeling a train-load of literary baggage from Anna Karenina to the mad Ophelia.

In a consummately Russian story, Anglo-American accents lay siege like the White Russian army marching on 1918 Moscow. Not just Mirren and Plummer but James McAvoy (Atonement) and Paul Giamatti are featured in this melodramatic adaptation of Jay Parini’s 1990 novel. As Tolstoy’s surly communist disciple Chertkov, Giamatti is a one-man dictatorship of the proletariat.

The time is 1910 and the elderly Tolstoy is world-famous for War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He has his own devout, cult-like following--Tolstoyans--who reject private property and other bourgeois freedoms. In the battle for Tolstoy’s heart and writing royalties, writer/director Michael Hoffman (Restoration) pits Chertkov against Sofya, who’s desperately afraid she and her family will be edited out of Tolstoy’s will. Valentin (McAvoy), Tolstoy’s nervous new secretary, is caught in the middle of Hoffman’s mild and mannered Marxist dialectic.

There’s little doubt which side Hoffman is on in the war between fiery love and cold idealism. Giamatti’s Chertkov is a sneering, spying proto-Lenin who has a Rasputin-like grip on the weary old man. Despite Sofya’s insecurities and snide elitism, she’s devoted to her husband, even after their marriage derails in the last act.

Broad and soap-operatic, Mirren’s performance is the antithesis of the precise and nuanced work that won her (deservedly) the Oscar crown for The Queen. While Mirren overacts, McAvoy dithers and sneezes as Valentin, flashing those big blue eyes that have hoodwinked him into U.K. stardom. As the spry, free-spirited Masha, Valentin’s lover, only Kerry Condon escapes Hoffman’s train wreck.

The Last Station is handsome to look at, decorated in posh production design and the tree-lined vistas of Tolstoy’s estate (actually shot in Germany). But it’s formulaic in ways that make 1980s Merchant-Ivory films look like Russian avant-garde cinema. Reel in a few continental stars, toss in pretty pictures, a little sex and pseudo-literary cred, and you have a nouveau version of Truffaut’s tradition of quality. As a revolutionary alternative, Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and their comrades roiled the film world with the French New Wave in the 1960s. What can audiences hope for against today’s sea of art-film artifice?

--------------

2/16/09