December 18, 2006
the queen
The Queen has drawn praise for three different (albeit overlapping) reasons: 1) Helen Mirren's superlative acting; 2) the film's insightful portrayal of its characters and circumstance; and 3) how extraordinarily well-made a movie it is. These purported felicities are, respectively: boringly true, piffle, and the exact opposite of the case.
1) It's well-known that Oscar-bait roles involve playing disabled or wicked ugly. The other thing that critics just love is lead characters who are fundamentally inexpressive, at which point capital-A Actors can haul out their minimalist retinal tics, lip quivers and eyebrow twitches, allowing critics to blather on about how nobody so eloquently indicates a complex inner life with nothing more than a glance, a crinkled earlobe, blah blah blah. We should never have to read that sentence again. Sure, it's a skill: a mildly technical skill that's no more challenging than being appealing or sexy, witty, smart or funny, awful or fearsome. Probably less so. But it gives critics and others a chance to display their nuanced recognition of nuance, and so these nuanced Helen Mirren perfs will be with us indefinitely. Listen, she's perfectly good at that sort of thing, and the role called for it, so: good casting, guys! As a 2006 acting "achievement," it doesn't rank with Shareeka Epps, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Maggie Cheung, Sacha Baron Cohen (in Talladega Nights), Rob Brydon, Gong Li, Steve Carell, Lucy Liu (in Lucky Number Slevin), Nick Nolte, T.I (in ATL), Leonardo Nam (Tokyo Drift), etc. Not sure it's more compelling than that guy who played the lead in Crank.
2) The monarchy hasn't really kept pace with changes in the velocity of culture and the popularization of celebrity. But actual politicians have because they traffic in that stuff. The former will be broken on the wheel of the latter, but sympathetically. Whoo.
3) The best that can be said about The Queen's cinematic construction is that it's very taut; not a move is wasted. That's what "well-made" means, most often, and it's exactly the problem; it's as if the film were trying to make the case for "the art film" being every bit as rigid and determined a genre as anything Hollywood could come up with. At least Hollywood films have the courage of their lack of conviction, and the capacity thus to be excessive, muddled, absurd. There is no moment nor gesture in The Queen that escapes its fate as crudely telegraphic (at the beginning when he's just an uncertain commoner, the quite short person playing Tony Blair wears football jerseys; you can tell when he's come into his own because he starts wearing suits!); as a mechanistic part of the parallel plot structure (which guy in the PM's camp is like which guy in the royal retinue? We'll never figure it out!); or as broadly symbolic (the noble old stag being harried in its solitude across the vast spaces of Balmoral — this noble old stag with which the Queen is obsessed — a stag eventually slain not by an aristocrat but a mere businessman hunter up from the City — the stag stands for...the Queen!)
If there is anything interesting about this movie, it's the extent to which to like it requires a commitment to nostalgic values that were always markers of privilege in the first place, though in this debased age they just resonate as "quality"...which is to say, to like this movie is already to identify with the royals (though alas, such narrowminded "standards" resonate more with prickish Prince Philip's character than poor uptight Eliz). If the deck weren't stacked enough in setting up this parallel (and, as noted, the film doesn't hesitate to make these matters blatant), we know that Diana's funeral is a truly debased event because, in the news footage edited in, we see a sprinkling not of aristocratic dignitaries but mere entertainers captured in pointed slo-mo, pointedly including Stephen Spielberg. Boo! Hiss! Now if only this movie were one seventeenth as interesting as Jaws...
Posted by jane at December 18, 2006 11:57 AM | TrackBack