Fantastic movie. Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush are wonderful and the film is extremely well made. The core of the film is the relationship between the soon-to-be George VI of England in the 1930's and his speech therapist -- without whom it seems the stuttering Windsor prince (who is to be king by default) is unable to connect to his soon-to-be subjects. The title of the movie refers both to the king's actual ability to speak and to the particular speech he needed to make in order to rally the English to war in 1939. The delivery of this speech is the culmination of the movie -- and a wonderfully climactic one.
Although the mode of connection between the two men is speech, it is at base a therapeutic relationship. The speech therapist, Lionel Logue (whose journals have evidently just been discovered) is an Australian -- a lower-middle-class-professional Australian, at that. Logue insists on working with his secret royal client on a first-name basis -- calling him "Bertie" -- and tries to break through the painful walls of formality, sterility and cruelty surrounding his famous client.
The result is an honest and vulnerable human relationship that allows for the flowering of the man who really wants, despite his trepidations, to fulfill his responsibility to family and country (as opposed to his famously abdicating brother, the Prince of Wales, who leaves the throne to be with "the woman he loves").
Fantastic, as I said. Five stars, Marie's Movies.
My favorite moment -- Geoffrey Rush's delivery of the last line of this exchange:
ReplyDeleteLionel: [as "Berty" lights a cigarette] Don't do that in here.
King: Why not?
Lionel: Sucking smoke into your lungs will kill you.
King: My physicians tell me it helps to relax the throat.
Lionel: They're idiots.
King: They've been knighted.
Lionel: Makes it official then.