The King's Speech
Firth is royalty, even if ‘King’s Speech’ is a little stiff
Is civility enough to sustain a film? The audiences who will embrace “The King’s Speech’’ — and they are many and literate — will point to it as an example of the kind of movie that should be made more often. By February they may well have the Academy Awards to prove their point. It’s probably useless to argue in the face of such unerring good taste. Yet for some of us, Tom Hooper’s period drama about the stammer of King George VI is exactly the kind of movie we’ve had enough of — complacent middlebrow tosh engineered for maximum awards bling and catering to a nostalgia for the royalty we’ve never actually had to live with.
The movie isn’t badly done, just overdone — a cozy art-house crowd-pleaser coasting on the expectations of its genre. At its heart is another very, very good performance by Colin Firth, one that may win him the Oscar he should have been awarded for last year’s “A Single Man.’’ As Albert Frederick Arthur George Windsor — Bertie to his family, the Duke of York and eventually George VI to his subjects — Firth is a tormented paradox, a man born to public life who can barely speak in public without strangling on his own words.
“The King’s Speech’’ opens with the Duke’s 1925 address at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Stadium, a radio talk that proved agonizing for everyone involved. By the time his wife (Helena Bonham Carter) brings him to the tatty London offices of speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), the Duke has thrown in the towel. Knowing his older brother, Edward (Guy Pearce), is in line for the throne, he is settling unhappily into the life of a stuffed royal dummy, seen but never heard. Only the sorrowful squint of Firth’s eyes lets us guess at the fury inside.
If Firth’s performance is many-leveled, Rush carves us another warm and filling slice of