Word: royall
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Sitting in the living room at Balmoral, knitting and nattering in their plain wool sweaters, caring more for their pets than for their children, the royal family of this film seems a parody of the pettiness and insularity of the English middle class; they might be the Monty Python gang in drab drag. Yet despite their sternest efforts to keep up the moat bridge, Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) and her blinkered clan are about to learn how little they understood the appeal of the woman who, they think, betrayed them...
...History isn't supposed to repeat itself so quickly, but George W. Bush's tardy response last year to Katrina's devastation of the Gulf Coast echoed almost exactly the lethargy that enveloped the Royal Family of Britain eight years before, in the days following the car crash that killed Princess Diana. Like Bush in Crawford, the Queen stayed holed up in Balmoral, her country estate in Scotland, while her subjects, shocked by the violent death of the blond goddess whose flaws they cherished as much as her charms, sobbed their hearts out. Strange, isn't it, how the powerful...
...movie's patina of textual and textural accuracy comes from voluminous research by the BBC Films team, including interviews with Windsor insiders, a chatty crowd. Elizabeth might be expected to run a tight ship with tight lips; but because royal scandal is a marketable commodity and the tabloid press voracious and rapacious, Buckingham Palace regularly springs more leaks than the Titanic. So you may take it as gossip gospel that Princess Margaret made the ungenerous observation quoted in the film that Diana was even "more irritating dead than alive." Morton also did a lot of asking around, and people answered...
...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...
...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. (Now, now, Corliss, give Elizabeth her due: she has trained her dogs beautifully, perhaps because...