Is there something in the air, say, the stench of death and decline of empire, to have inspired the recent spate of films about imperial power? Fashionistas of course are already worshiping at the altar of Marie Antoinette, with its title bubblehead and hollow charms, while Forest Whitaker devotees are savoring the outre venality of Idi Amin in the rather too enthusiastically entertaining Last King of Scotland. Those who think more crowned heads should have rolled in the 18th century, in the meantime, can cozy up to The Queen, a sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family.
Directed by Stephen Frears from a very smart script by Peter Morgan, who helped write The Last King of Scotland, also about crazy rulers and the people who love (and hate) them, The Queen pries open a window in the House of Windsor around the time of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, blending fact with fiction. It begins just days before her fatal car crash in 1997, when the princess, glimpsed only in television news clips and photographs, had completely transformed into Diana, the onetime palace prisoner turned jet-setting divorcee. The transformation was fit for a fairy tale: the lamb had been led to slaughter (cue Madonna's Like a Virgin) and escaped in triumph (crank the Material Girl's Bye Bye Baby). Elizabeth II wore the crown, but it was Diana who now ruled.
How heavy that crown and how very lightly Helen Mirren wears it as queen. With Frears' gentle guidance, she delivers a performance remarkable in its art and lack of sentimentalism. Actors need to be loved, but one of Mirren's strengths has always been her supreme self-confidence that we will love the performance no matter how unsympathetic the character. It takes guts to risk our antipathy, to invite us in with brilliant technique rather than bids for empathy. Even Whitaker's Idi Amin seems to shed some tears. Mirren's queen sheds a few too, but having climbed deep inside Elizabeth II, a vessel as heavily fortified as a gunship, she also coolly takes her character apart from the inside out, piece by machined piece.
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This toughness is bracing, at times exhilarating, and it also reminds you of just how very good a director Frears can be; certainly it's a relief after the shameless pandering in his last venture, Mrs. Henderson Presents. The new film serves as a return to form for the director not only of Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters, both of which share with The Queen an interest in toxic tribal formations, but also of more freewheeling ensemble entertainments like Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. The focus in The Queen remains fixed on Elizabeth and her relationship with the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), but it also finds room for a host of smaller, precisely realized characters, each adding daubs of gaudy or grim color.
The secondary characters prove especially crucial because it's through their dealings with The Queen, their awe and boobishness (including James Cromwell's dim-bulb Prince Philip), that we start to get a handle on her. A creature of history and ritual, Elizabeth might have been born in another century (or on another planet), a point Morgan lays out on the page and which Frears illustrates with lapidary attention to visual detail. Much of the story takes place inside Buckingham Palace and at Elizabeth's Scottish estate Balmoral, sepulchers in which the royals have shut themselves up with their servants and riches. Certainly The Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms) seems half-dead already, her carefully planned funeral almost an afterthought. It's no wonder the outside world seems so intrusive, even when its knocks are delivered by white glove.
Diana's death interrupts Elizabeth's sleep in more ways than one: a gentle hand comes knocking, and in time so does the rest of the world, which takes to the abbreviated life of Our Lady of Televised Confession with passion that in time borders on the religious, the hysterical, the mad. Shortly after Prince Charles (Alex Jennings, both sniveling and sly) brings Diana's body back from Paris, The Queen retreats to Balmoral without comment, not a hair on her tightly coiffed head out of place. Her stubborn quiet only fuels the clamorous sorrow of the public, which lays thousands of bouquets before Buckingham Palace, gestures of mourning that turn into a veritable barricade as overt in menace and purpose as the upturned paving stones of the French Revolution.
The ensuing crisis of confidence solidifies Blair's power, bringing the monarchy one step closer to oblivion. As Elizabeth strides around Balmoral in tweeds and sensible shoes, back in London Blair undergoes a metamorphosis of his own, becoming the official voice of healing.
Eager to please his masters, queen and public both, he makes the most of Diana's death, setting his stamp on the next decade. His wife (Helen McCrory) can only cast an increasingly leery eye at his performance of grief. (Oh, to be a fly on that household wall.) She may not yet know it, but this is a battle, and she's losing: Blair doesn't just mourn Diana; he all but becomes a new sacrament, offering up his own touchy-feely persona for public consumption with smiles and moist eyes. There is something appealingly puppyish about the prime minister's buzzing excitement as the crisis reaches its apex: he's seizing the day like a bone. But like all dogs Blair needs someone to bring him to heel, and while Elizabeth's authority is more ceremonial than actual, she and he play their part in the pantomime of power.
It's this pantomime that fascinates Frears, who unmasks it as much as he does The Queen, whose dusting of face powder and glazed stare pointedly evoke another, earlier, Elizabeth. Yet if the director shows us the woman beneath the Kabuki-like facade, it's not to transform her into a softie, hankie at the ready; it's to strip away the mystique that once shored up the monarchy's real power and now merely serves as a fig leaf for its spoils.
Diana consecrates Blair, but so does Elizabeth, whose bafflement at the sharing-and-caring of "the people," as she calls them, almost marks her for extinction. Her slow-dawning realization of the cultural shift that had already changed the country is beautifully realized, though not because the actress and her director mistake The Queen's intelligence for sentiment. Elizabeth no more likes Diana after death than before. When The Queen does break her silence, as we know she will, having watched the moment on television once upon a time, it isn't because of this vexing young woman. It's because Elizabeth, standing alone in the Scottish countryside, Frears' camera hovering close and then moving off to take in the glorious view, has finally understood not only the implications of her past but also those of the present.
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