Word: elizabeth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...That's wishful thinking. Elizabeth has always struck me as a crabby soul. Her job is, essentially, to smile in public, yet she's never been good at it. The grin seems more a grimace, as if she grudges the effort it takes to move those facial muscles. If warmth and beauty are requisites of regality, she's flunked the test. Perhaps because of the coldness I sense in Elizabeth, I've often felt a sympathy for Charles, whom I'm guessing didn't get a lot of it at home. He works so hard at the game of ingratiation...
...identify the body then suggest he get there not on the royal jet but by connecting commercial flights. When the others attack Diana's skills as a mother, Charles makes pointed remarks about the love she showered on her two sons, unlike his own mother. (Now, now, Corliss, give Elizabeth her due: she has trained her dogs beautifully, perhaps because she's shown them more attention and affection...
...statement, betray no emotions. To them, the interviews that Diana gave, in which she complained of her isolation from the family, were breaches of domestic trust bordering on treason. (Diana is seen only in news footage, and the film weaves some of these TV clips into the action.) Elizabeth figures a terse silence is best - best for a discreet monarchy and best for the boys, Harry and Andrew. Prince Philip (a slyly ruthless, bullying performance by James Cromwell) wants to take the lads hunting. Right: nothing'll take their mind off death like going out and killing something...
...keeps telling the Queen that a condoling word or two might be in order. Only then does she realize with a shock that she was not the most beloved woman in Britain. Blair has to slap the royals awake to recognize the intensity of the nation's grief and Elizabeth's need to display some herself. Blair, who has a mother about the Queen's age, becomes the son Elizabeth never had: the one she listens...
...After about an hour of wickedly acute satire, the movie shifts its focus to find the pathos behind Elizabeth's hooded gaze. As incarnated by Mirren, the least sentimental of great actresses, the Queen might be any aging executive, devastated by the insight that her reign has been endured but not embraced. Or any mother who mistakenly took for granted that she would be loved as well as obeyed. Mirren, who won a Tony playing Elizabeth I for HBO, may well deserve an Oscar for this ripe appraisal of Elizabeth II. Her performance shows how an aging monarch can both...