The King’s Speech
In 2011, Pip and I decided to watch all the nominated films for the Oscar that year. In the meantime, we actually managed to watch all of them, besides “The kids are all right” whose story doesn’t sound appealing to me at all and – well – the winner, “The King’s Speech”. Until today, I have absolutely no idea how that happened, since we planned to see and, on top of that, 314 explicitly recommended it. Luckily, the film is on Netflix!
After seeing “Winter’s Bone”, I got into a strange slump in which I didn’t really feel like writing about the film. Most likely it was another case in which I wanted to praise the film, but I didn’t really know how. Whenever I feel like I have a hard time justifying my impressions of a film, I easily slip into a writer’s block which could take over all the films I see afterwards. Yesterday, I tried to make a list of films I have seen recently, and almost forgot that I saw “The King’s Speech”. (This is how I sometimes watch movies without blogging about them!) I am quite surprised, because throughout the duration of the film, I was extremely pleased with it.
It’s quite a miracle really. Not that much actually happens in “The King’s Speech”. One can easily summarize it with “Guy has problems with stammering, takes on an unconventional teacher, becomes king and by the end of the movie, gives a speech fluently”. Even though I was a little tired and realize that the film was on the slower side, I never felt like the film was slow. The main characters in the film were pleasantly likable, yet with enough weaknesses to be believable. “The King’s Speech” is Hollywood’s dream movie really – funny but not silly, melodramatic without being kitsch, predictable yet still enjoyable, and most importantly, somewhat sophisticated yet emotional at the same time. I also don’t have to mention that I thought the film was beautifully shot as well. When the film pauses on a close-up of Colin Firth’s face, it actually creates dramatic tension.
With that said, of course it turns out that the film is not exactly historically correct at all. To heighten the drama, it is suggested that it took Bertie years to get better, some characters are vilified (such as Wallis Simpson) and others introduced where they probably have not been historically (such as Churchill). I had a feeling that would be the case, because stammering is probably the kind of thing that you can either cure quite easily – or not at all. It sounds unlikely for someone to go through years of agony and therapy to go from stammering to a proper speech.
So if I liked the film so much, why did I almost forgot that I saw it? Well, the film is forgettable in some sense – there is no deeper humanity in it, no big revelations to be gained from it, all it was to me were 2 hours very well spent. It’s a wonderfully crafted film, and totally deserved its Oscar (even if I may have enjoyed “True Grit” and “Winter’s Bone” even more).