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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