Word: queens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...That, anyway, is the proposition of The Queen, an immensely entertaining and seemingly acute chronicle of the week Diana died, as dramatized through the very different reactions of stern, befogged Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) and of Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), who was keenly attuned to public sentiment and how to manipulate it. The film, written by Peter Morton and directed by Stephen Frears (best known for Dangerous Liaisons), won the screenplay and actress prizes at Venice this month. Friday The Queen helps launch the 44th New York Film Festival before opening in selected cities...
...however accurate the portrait of the royals in The Queen, the first impression the movie gives is one of cool, devastating satire. Or perhaps Elizabeth and her family really are as drab as the film paints them! They don't aspire to glamour; they renounce it. Cloistered at Balmoral, knitting and nattering in their plain wool sweaters, caring more for their pets than for their children, the Royal Family seems a parody of the pettiness and insularity of the English middle class. They might be the extended clan of Wallace and Gromit or cousins of Mrs. Proposition and Mrs. Conclusion...
...happens, my prejudices or insights are seconded by The Queen. Charles (played with a dense delicacy by Alex Jennings) is the one member of the family immediately and deeply stricken by the news of Diana's death. He grieves for her, as his parents first refuse his request to go to Paris to 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...
...Enter Blair, who had been swept into 10 Downing Street in a landslide a few months before. Incorrigibly cheerful and gently manipulative, he 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...