newcritics

Question kept going through my head while watching The Queen, particularly during the scenes of the Queen bouncing along in her Land Rover as she drove herself up into the highlands around Balmoral Castle.

Whose job was it to teach the young Princess Elizabeth to drive? Googled up my answer as soon as we got home. Turns out, it was the Army’s job.


That’s Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor changing that tire. Princess Elizabeth served as an Army driver during the Second World War, the first female member of the Royal Family to join the military.

Another question that kept popping into my head—after my follow-up to the first question, “I’m sure she can drive, but does she really drive herself around all alone like that, with no bodyguards or secretaries or other flunkies about?”—was, How much of what’s being presented here is based on known facts?

What went on on Tony Blair’s end could be practically a matter of public record. He and his people are so used to talking about their jobs in public, and wouldn’t have much reason to hedge, although they might puff, that a straight-forward telling of the events of that week as they unfolded at 10 Downing Street could have made it into the news.

But anything known about what went on in the Royals’ apartments at Balmoral would be based on palace gossip, and much of that would be gossip about gossip.

There’s a wonderful scene in which the Queen catches a glimpse through a half-open doorway of Prince Charles telling his sons that their mother has died. We don’t hear what he’s saying, but we see him being tender and loving and sad, sharing their grief. At one point he ruffles Prince Harry’s hair.

Did that happen? Did Charles handle it so gracefully? Did the Queen see it happen? Who knows? I mean that as in Who would have been there to say? Who would have said? The Queen herself?

That’s the greatness of Peter Morgan’s screenplay. He’s made scenes that have to have been based on pure speculation more than merely plausible, he’s made them somehow essentially truthful. We feel pretty sure if things didn’t happen exactly as they’re portrayed, if people didn’t say exactly what they’re made to say, then something very much like that did happen, and things very much like that were said.

Last summer I wrote a couple of posts grousing about the way Deadwood’s creator David Milch used the character of George Hearst. I felt, still feel, that Milch’s disregard of history in the case of Hearst amounts to a libel.

Not the case with Morgan’s script. What he makes up is truer to life than stuff Milch cribbed straight from the history books. Scenes that show Elizabeth and her family as less than admirable, scenes that put Cherie Blair in a bad light, while probably made up, jive so well with what is known about their characters and behavior if not that week then under other circumstances, that, again, like I said, if things didn’t happen exactly like this, then whatever happened must have been awfully close to it.

Stephen Frears’ tight, crisp, but understated direction and the cast’s low-key performances help insist upon this. Frears and the actors want to make sure they don’t add any more fiction to the movie than is already, necessarily there.

There’s a Shakespearean feel to the structure of the script too. Of course anything involving intrigue among British royals will remind me of Shakespeare. But in this case I think Morgan was conscious of Shakespeare’s shadow and conscientiously and confidently worked in that shadow.

Movie opens with a quote after all. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Firmly places Elizabeth in the line of Henry IV, who had his own rebellious princes and disgruntled subjects to worry about.

Difference is that at one time great affairs of state were decided by who murdered whom and now, at least as presented in The Queen, they’re decided by whose images and sound bites dominate the news.

As the title of the post says, folks, this is not a review. I’m just making notes about things that the movie got me thinking about.

The only important thing I have to say about The Queen as a piece of filmmaking is that Helen Mirren not only better win the Oscar this year, they should give it to her every year for the next five or six, because one little gold statue isn’t enough to reward the magnificence of her performance.

The rest of the cast is very good too, although Michael Sheen looked too much like Tony Blair, the way a caricature in a political cartoon would look too much like him, and it was a long way into the movie before I could get past that. I need to watch it again to give his performance its due.

I liked the performance Frears got out of Princess Di too.

He used the clips of the real Diana to such perfect effect that he made her a character in the movie, even to the point of having her “interact” with the other actors. The frozen shot of her sly sideways grin at the end of the funeral scene was devastating and you know that Elizabeth “saw” it.

This is the part where this post really stops being a review.

I never got Princess Diana.

She was barely on my radar. I managed to ignore most the news about her when she was alive, just because I wasn’t interested in the doings of the Royal Family. After her “fairy tale” marriage to Charles began to disintegrate—the fact that anyone would seriously refer to a marriage that was about as romantically motivated as the breeding of show dogs as a fairy tale always perplexed me—Diana’s presence in the media became harder to ignore, but then she struck me as nothing more than a British version of that regular feature of American gossip columns, the spoiled rich girl manufactured into a celebrity so that the gossip columnists could justify reporting on her sex life as “news.” Just a Brit twit precurser to Paris Hilton.

So imagine a giant public outpouring of grief if Paris parties herself into an early grave and then you can imagine how stunned I was by what followed in the days after Princess Diana died.

I learned a lot about her and the affection people felt for her afterwards. I hadn’t even known about all her charitable and humanitarian work. But during that week I thought that the flowers and the crowds and the anger over the Royals’ apparent lack of grief struck me as ridiculous. I thought, and still think, a lot of the people who turned up to mourn for their Princess were playing for the TV cameras. I think that if the Media didn’t create the mobs, they encouraged them to grow, and the show of grief on the part of the people that talking heads were at pains to tell us was “spontaneous” was a show and they were spontaneous not in being natural and reflexive but in springing up out of nothing—that a lot of the people who appeared on TV broken hearted at their Princess’s death hadn’t thought much about her while she was still alive and caught their heartbreak like a flu bug from other people around them.

So I sympathized with Elizabeth’s bemusement and disgust at what she was seeing on TV in The Queen. I can imagine how much more difficult it must have been for her to understand how her people had become Diana’s people and why they’d admire Diana for her public self-indulgences of and hate the Queen for her restraint and self-denial.

Diana amused the mob, while the Queen served the nation.

Which is why I could also sympathize with the movie’s Tony Blair and how the very liberal and democratic Prime Minister began to act and speak as if he was the most conservative and staunchest royalist.

Cherie Blair is at her worst in The Queen when she attempts to belittle her husband’s sudden loyalty to Elizabeth as Oedipally motived, as the working out of his own mommy issues. She entirely misses the point. Her husband is at this critical moment not a Labourite, not a radical, not a conservative or a Windsorite either. He’s a patriot.

The mob is the enemy of democracy.

He sees the people turning into a mob and he sets out to save the nation, which he grasps quickly means first saving the Queen from herself.

Elizabeth’s hardness towards Diana even in death is far from admirable. In the movie the Queen and her mother exchange a couple of shots at Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret, who acted out in public several private soap operas, and I wondered if in real life Diana suffered for Margaret’s bad behavior, if the Royal Family took out its anger at one of their own on her.

It’s hard, though, to imagine that the real Elizabeth could have been as heartless as the movie has her. The movie’s Elizabeth worries about the effect of everything on “the boys,” the young princes, Diana’s children, but her worry never causes her to spend any time with them. She even seems to be avoiding them, most likely because she is afraid she won’t be able to pretend to share their grief, but possibly because she just doesn’t want to subject herself to the messiness of comforting crying children.

But she is right about one thing. The way she sees people on television behaving is not the way grown-ups should act. The self-pity and raw sentimentality on display are qualities that we discourage in children. It is ridiculous that the Media should present them as if they are admirable and as if they should be indulged.

England would not have survived the first couple years of the War if this had been how the people had responded to tragedy and calamity and death.

She is right.

But Blair is more right.

There are times when the best way for a leader to take on the mob is to join it.

At one point Elizabeth objects to the idea of making a public appearance—which to her means making a public spectacle of herself—on the grounds that none of her predecessors would have stooped to such vulgar behavior.

But she’s forgotten her history.

She only needs to start by remembering one of the very first of her line, Henry II, “naked and shivering in the draughts” of the cathedral, humiliating himself to make public amends for the murder of Thomas a Becket.

Anouilh, not Shakespeare, but you get the point.