The Queen: A Review

December 6, 2006

My mental image of the Queen of England was dominated by that odd "talking hat" incident in which she addresses the cameras, but all the cameras can pick up is a gently bobbing hat. I never could have imagined her driving around by herself in a four-wheel drive jeep. The Queen was worth the money just for the way it handed me a humanized version of the Queen and the royal family.

The director Stephen Frears enters a strange genre which so far as I know has no real name. So let's call it the Re-life genre.. characterized by the exact reproduction of recent events. United 93 was another example.. and then think of the last couple of films by Gus Van Sant, Last Days about the death of Kurt Cobain, and Elephant about the Columbine killings. The films gain authority by hewing so closely to known facts and details that they amount to a re-living of events. As little fiction as possible makes its way into these films.. although at crucial moments they are apt to incorporate events that are wildly improbable.

This may sound like the standard operating procedure for all historic films, but there is a difference: when an actor elects to play a real historical figure—such as Queen Victoria—she may do a lot of research, but at the end of the day she must invent a character, adding the tiny details of behavior that make a character believable. The historical figures treated by the Re-life genre are of a different order. These figures have lived through our video saturated age, and therefore the details of their behavior are not to be invented, but to be mimicked. Helen Mirren had to study the walk, the look, and the voice of the Queen. Ditto the Kurt Cobain played by Michael Pitt. Other films of the genre do not center on celebrities, but the focus of the actor is still not to create unique characters, but to mold themselves into some specific position: air-traffic controller or high school teacher.

What does the audience get out of these films that try to re-live an event? I get this question after each viewing of a film in this genre.. since my viewing partner is always falling asleep! Clearly, not every event in life is worthy of this close detailed production. But these films get traction through their ability to treat cultural issues that are difficult to see clearly in the glare of media blitzes.

In the case of The Queen we come across a crux of modern life: the difference between the world of the image and the world of private life. The death of Princess Diana left the world mourning for a person they had seen on television; the royal family had to deal with the death of a real person. The easy thing for a filmmaker to do would have been to demonize one side or the other.. the petty formalities of the royal family or the petty demands of the image obsessed public and the tabloids. Mediating this conflict is the newly elected Tony Blair, with a natural sense of what the public needs, but also a keen feeling for the Queen's traditional manner of meeting the challenge. It is through his eyes that the audience comes to see the conflict.. he functions as our guide.

Throughout the film we feel the gravitational pull of the radiant personality, Princess Diana.. the "people's princess." By the end we have begun to doubt that beautiful image.. buried with stars in attendance.. and we have gained a dose of respect for the curmudgeonly and quiet values of the Queen. That respect is built scene by scene as a private life is built in our imaginations by the picky accuracy of the Re-life genre. It is not a respect that any other genre could have so neatly constructed.