The Queen

I was 11 when I first looked Death in the face. As news bulletins spread word of what happened that August night, I found my own heart breaking for a woman I never really knew of until the moment of her passing. Princess Diana, killed by the heartless media who pursued her in life, became a symbol for both motherly devotion, and stubborn conviction against the conformity of royal tradition. The new Prime Minister Tony Blair’s labeling of Diana as the ‘People’s Princess’ seemed justified by the countless citizens who left a garden of flowers at the palace gates, while Elton John’s rendition of “Candle in the Wind” haunted her crowded funeral. Yet even at that age, I was puzzled by the old emotionless woman who inspired frowns from the public, as her sad, restrained eyes peered out from those giant, impenetrable spectacles.

The woman I’m referring to is, of course, Queen Elizabeth II, and she’s the subject of this exceptional drama from director Stephen Frears. Elizabeth is played by Helen Mirren, who transcends the boundaries of mere performance, and triumphantly embodies this individual by unearthing her oft-hidden humanity. Like Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth began her reign at a young age, and like Coppola’s Antoinette film, The Queen generates much amusement from the laughably rigid etiquette and ancient formalities she strictly follows with learned discipline. With every movement and uttered syllable, Elizabeth seems to live her life by following instructions on a protocol sheet. Mirren’s genius is in how she conveys Elizabeth’s emotions through the subtlest nuance and smallest pause. It’s a towering performance that doesn’t draw attention to itself, thereby staying true to Elizabeth’s own mannered nature.

Frears’s film focuses on the seemingly endless week following Diana’s death in the summer twilight of 1997. As the proud yet rather powerless figurehead of an iconic but pointless monarchy, Elizabeth decides that the tragedy is a private matter, and refuses Blair’s requests for her to make a public statement on the subject. Criticism spreads like wildfire through an English public convinced that the Queen’s silence is a sign of her cruelty toward Diana, who garnered much monarchial resentment for her unconventional – aka human – nature. There’s an immensely powerful moment when the public’s passionate applause infiltrates the stifling silence of Diana’s funeral. The cheers become, in essence, the animalistic rumbling of life Elizabeth has practiced to deny her entire reign.

Yet Frears, along with screenwriter Peter Morgan, doesn’t invite the audience to either judge or sympathize with Elizabeth. Their cinematic portrait is all the more fascinating in its own dramatic restraint, by delving into Her Highness’s psyche without a trace of sensationalism. Although the youthful, seemingly progressive Blair, played by Michael Sheen, is initially exasperated by Elizabeth’s resistance to his demands, he eventually has an inexplicable change of heart that seems to be more easily comprehended by Elizabeth herself. Her line, “the headlines will happen to you too”, has an eerie resonance now that Blair’s own popularity has faltered with his support of the Bush administration. Sheen is one of several marvelous character actors populating Frears’s filmic stage, which also includes Sylvia Syms as Elizabeth’s astute mother, and a wonderful James Cromwell as Elizabeth’s fiercely ignorant husband Philip, whose idea of a great tragedy doesn’t seem to extent beyond a shallow curtsy and a cold cup of tea.

Elizabeth’s determined struggle to live “quietly and with dignity” gradually proves to be exactly what the public doesn’t want, who loved Diana all the more for her “weaknesses.” The Queen’s single emotional outburst is witnessed only by a stag, the corpse of which Elizabeth later finds hanging in a neighbor’s house near her summer estate. As she gazes into the hollow eyes which once belonged to a wild spirit cut down in the prime of its life, only then can Elizabeth seem to admire, and mourn, the deceased princess. Such subtext might have been impossible to deliver with any other actress, but Mirren has the ability to communicate an eternity in a single glance. She single-handedly makes The Queen one of the year’s best films, and one of the finest character studies I’ve ever seen.

Rating: ***** (out of *****)