The King's Speech

By George, He's Got It!

2010 // UK // Tom Hooper // March 16, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

C+ - The King's Speech is a more or less pleasing slice of entertainment, one that snugly fulfills the familiar parameters established by countless portrayals of personalized Struggle Against Adversity. The fact that the protagonist in this instance is the reluctant monarch of a corroding empire--and that his mentor-rival is played by a pithy and unflappable Geoffrey Rush--only amplifies the film's surface allure. As cinema, however, Tom Hooper's film is a distressingly thin and vacant work, undergirded by an implicit and almost snotty presumption that if the beats are recognizable and the ornaments polished, then artistic vitality is a given. Hooper's previous work, The Damned United, likewise suffered from dramatic triteness, but was nonetheless a remarkably nimble and inventive film, persistently surprising with its subversion of sports film conventions and its acerbic thematic grumblings. The King's Speech, by contrast, rests almost entirely on musty appeals to emotion, whether garbed in its distinctly British ethos of duty and perseverance or in the admittedly superb design of its period trappings. Better writers than I have skewered the film's ahistorical flourishes, elisions, and reversals, but this isn't the place for a debate about factual accuracy in narrative features. Even if approached as a work of fiction, The King's Speech is handsome but woefully timid stuff, perhaps the mildest picture to clinch a Best Picture statuette in twenty years.

The story is perhaps familiar to Anglophiles who have followed the travails of the House of Windsor: In the years between the World Wars, Prince Albert (Colin Firth), second son of England's King George V, begins working with speech therapist Lionel Logue (Rush) in order to overcome his life-long stammer. This effort becomes especially crucial after the prince's older brother Edward abdicates the throne, after which Alfred is crowned King George VI, even as Europe lurches towards war. There's not much more to the tale than that, and the film presents the king's September 3, 1939 radio speech to the nation as the dramatic climax of his personal clashes with Logue and his own psychological struggles. It's remarkably slender stuff on which to hang 118 minutes, but it is to Hooper's credit that he manages to keep the proceedings brisk and focused.

Stylistically, the film possesses a rather shameless, preening affection for the grandiose, but the narrative itself is anything but puffy, hewing as it does so firmly and neatly to the framework of the "personal struggle film" sub-genre, complete with a second act rift between teacher and student. Things hum along quite nicely, assisted by the estimable performers, particularly Rush, whose lightning wit and disarming presence serve to leaven all the royal starch with slatherings of modern, populist sarcasm. Helena Bonham Carter weaves a similar spell, humanizing the queen consort Elizabeth as a droll and unfaltering lady, assured in a position that she acknowledges is prestigious but powerless. Firth is game and mainly compelling in a role that demands not only a measure of vocal craft, but also character traits slightly outside his usual purview. Firth presents Albert as a morally upright but altogether weak man, suffused with an unpleasant blend of meekness and hotheadedness, and overlain with a pall of persistent, debilitating terror. The result is that while Albert is hardly appealing as a hero, The King's Speech succeeds in evoking authentic empathy for his plight. Here is a man in an exceptional position who happens to be afflicted with a disability that makes his principal responsibility awkward, if not impossible.

Of course, as with nearly all films about monarchs, Hooper's work is deeply invested in the notion that princes are just Regular People at bottom. The King's Speech flexes this message time and again, revealing it most conspicuously through Logue's obstinate demand for man-to-man equality during his sessions with Albert. This conceit never entirely persuades, but, admittedly, not due to a half-hearted or graceless presentation. Hooper is palpably convinced that his tale has a core of meritorious humanity, and he is an adept enough director to convey that sincerity on the screen. The problem, of course, is not the earnestness of the message, but its glibness, containing as it does no particular insights into the psychological landscape of those suffering form speech impediments, nor into the novel problems associated with even a declawed dynastic monarchy in the modern age.

The building blocks of The King's Speech are overwhelmingly direct and burnished pleasures: an evolving friendship between two men from different worlds, stymied at times by conflict; a man who must overcome his personal demons and lingering daddy complex, as much for himself and his loved ones as for the greater good; and, naturally, luscious design in the sets and costumes that flawlessly evokes Depression-era Britain in all its opulent, chic, and grubby glory (depending on the scene). The film's whole approach is carefully and exasperatingly tasteful, and while this is hardly inexplicable in the current environment of awards-bait prestige films, that doesn't make it any less bothersome. (Heck, even 2009's undeserving Best Picture winner, the unruly, unconvincing, and problematic Slumdog Millionaire, was at least energetic and even formally daring.)

The slightness of The King's Speech is perhaps most disappointing given that there is so much to admire on the surface, from Eve Stewart's production design--which glides effortlessly between sumptuously warm and bleakly cool--to stately work from cinematographer Danny Cohen. Like The Damned United, this film further establishes Cooper's enviable eye for aesthetic composition, especially his potent use of negative space. The film's only flourish is the director's employment of a wide lens for select shots, a perhaps gaudy touch that nonetheless effectively underlines Albert's anxious awareness of the public scrutiny that is continually focused on him. Ultimately, it would be stupidly contrary to dismiss Hooper as an untalented director, or The King's Speech as a poorly-made film. However, one can only wonder why such talent has brought to bear on a tale as conventional and emotionally limp as a Sunday school recital.

City Lights

1931 // USA // Charles Chaplin // March 4, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[City Lights was screened on March 4, 2011 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' retrospective on the feature films of Charles Chaplin.]

It's challenging to approach a work as enduring and esteemed as City Lights without expectations. This was my first re-visitation of the film since a thinly-recalled childhood viewing, and I was keen to silence the buzzing cogs of cerebral cinephilia in order to simply experience the thing. (Keeping in mind, of course, that this is not the same as "turning your brain off and having a good time," as defenders of awful films would suggest we do.) Fortunately, Chaplin's best films encourage just this sort of rapt emotional engagement, and City Lights is no exception. The film is a triumph of escapism, effortlessly transporting the viewer out of their everyday lives and into the silly, lonely existence of the Little Tramp. His is a straightforward and tattered sort of existence, animated in its particulars but remarkably static in overview. The Tramp has no home and no job, and therefore no need to trace a daily roundabout path between the two. His concerns are pragmatic and short-term: milking every unlikely passing situation for its simple joys, all while evading the authorities and the jibes of disdainful onlookers. (I was reminded, despite myself, of Henry Chianski's cheerful declaration in Barfly: "No money, no job, no rent. Hey, I'm back to normal!")  Suddenly: the monkey wrench. Enraptured by the Blind Girl, the Tramp discovers a pure and selfless love that compels him to seek out--gasp!--employment, putting his dignity and even his pasty little frame on the line for the Object of His Desire. It is that current of earnest longing that makes City Lights a sublime work of art rather than a "mere" sequence of masterful comic set pieces. The almost ecstatic vulnerability of the film's celebrated final scene reveals Chaplin as a profoundly humanist filmmaker. He heightens our awareness of every titter and guffaw we uttered at the Tramp's plight, highlighting that his silly antics are rooted in the most desperate and universal of human impulses: to be accepted, embraced, and loved, just as we are.​

Body Double

1984 // USA // Brian De Palma // February 15, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Body Double was screened on February 15, 2011 as a part of "How (Not) to Mind Your Own Business," the Webster University Film Series' three-feature retrospective on the films of Brian De Palma.]

Permit me the most facile observation about Brian De Palma's perversely mesmerizing thriller, Body Double: In every shot, and every frame, it is a self-consciously Bad Movie, one that teeters on that narrow ledge where all intentionally ridiculous kitsch artifacts attempt to position themselves. It's hard to know what to make of a work of cinema so garish and goofy, and yet capable, in its best moments, of evoking both aching loneliness and white-knuckle tension. Certainly, a film as contradictory and bizarre as Body Double isn't unexpected when the director in question is De Palma, but the film does strike me as his most deliberately trashy work, a precursor to the legion of disposable "erotic thrillers" that would crowd video store shelves and late-night television in the 1980s and 90s, at least in terms of its superficial content. Body Double is, of course, far more visually enthralling than such lesser kin. Its most cinematically conspicuous component is an extended, mostly wordless sequence in which out-of-work actor and amicable everyman Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) shadows his object of desire, Gloria (Deborah Shelton) first through a mall and then at a seaside motel. It's a stock murder mystery setpiece masterfully rendered by De Palma and cinematographer Stephen H. Burum. How, then, are we to react when it concludes with a ludicrous, lustful embrace, complete with the characteristic De Palma 360-degree panning shot and hideously saccharin score? Is this the director simply attempting, as he does much more explicitly elsewhere in the film, to rub our noses in the artificial and manipulative nature of the medium?

Body Double touches on many of the same thematic elements as Blow Out, but the lingering 1970s cynicism of the latter film is here replaced with a Reagan-era middle finger, complete with power-tool-wielding maniacs, vampire "punks" clad in black leather and chrome, and porn stars who specify their "wills" and "won'ts" in terms of orifice, substance, and species. I'm still not sure how I feel about a work perched so restlessly on the border between schlock and art, but Body Double is so obviously striving for the former that its silliest moments don't disrupt as they do in other De Palma ventures. Carlito's Way lulls you into nodding along with its personalized and almost spiritual approach to the gangster film... until Joe Cocker wailing out "You Are So Beautiful" makes you sit up and go, "Whaaaa...?" Body Double, by contrast, is chock-a-block with "Whaaaa...?" moments, and therefore nothing ever really seem out-of-place. Not even, say, a bizarre but admittedly lively music video sequence set to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax," with lip-syncing from a Joel Grey type by way of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Post-Script: Am I the only one who thinks the music used in the U-North advertisements in Tony Gilroy's stupendous white-collar thriller Michael Clayton bears an uncanny resemblance to Pino Donaggio's score for this film, and specifically to Gloria's "striptease theme"?

Blow Out

1981 // USA // Brian De Palma // February 8, 2011 // DVD - MGM (2001)

[Blow Out was screened on February 8, 2011 as a part of "How (Not) to Mind Your Own Business," the Webster University Film Series' three-feature retrospective on the films of Brian De Palma.]

Whether by dint of astute scheduling or pleasing happenstance, the Webster Film Series featured Brian De Palma's bleak, crackling thriller Blow Out one week after it screened Blow-Up, which made for a gratifying and revealing juxtaposition. De Palma's film is unmistakably functioning in the shadow of Antonioni's masterwork, as evidenced not only by its allusive title, but also by its prominent treatment of audio-visual craft, presented with a dazzling balance of admiration and cynicism. There's also, of course, the despairing thematic fixation on veracity in an era of constructed and reconstructed (and re-reconstructed) realities. Yet Blow Out is unmistakably a De Palma film, neither as unruly nor as artistically ambitious as Antonioni's, but dripping with the former director's garish signatures, from the dizzying mood of mortal peril to the goofy, maudlin music cues. Admittedly, even as a thriller, Blow Out doesn't always cohere properly: Far too many scenes rely on characters behaving with breathtaking callowness, particularly Nancy Allen's squeeze-toy / femme fatale, Sally. Yet despite my own ambivalent stance towards De Palma's works, I have to concede that the film stands out as one of his finest, a bold and fascinating amalgamation of diverse influences that still plays in the auteur's distinctive key. Sure, Blow Out exploits the noir tropes that recurrently occupy De Palma, and it brims with the expected Hitchcock nods. Most crucially, however, it represents a synthesis of the director's style with the indelible "paranoia films" of the 1970s (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, All the President's Men). And while I've never had much use for John Travolta, here the actor is as enthralling (and gorgeous) as he's ever been, portraying a character that is by turns shrewd, searing, and sweetly dim. Watching his sound engineer Jack stumble along in his attempts to charm Allen's naïve and anxious con-lady is the cherry on top of a striking performance.

Blow-Up

1966 // UK - Italy // Michelangelo Antonioni // February 2, 2011 // DVD - Warner Brothers (2004)​

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers. Blow-Up was screened on February 2, 2011 as a part of Strange Brew, the Webster University Film Series' monthly cult film series at Schlafly Bottleworks.]

There is a crucial moment about two-thirds of the way through Blow-Up, a moment that signals definitively, I think, that Antonioni's weirdly exciting film is evolving into something more profound than "just" a giddy depiction of London in the Swinging Sixties, or "merely" a remorselessly ambiguous thriller. David Hemming's obnoxiously self-assured fashion photographer Thomas, having revisited the public park were he unwittingly documented a murder on film, returns to his studio to pore over the successive enlargements that seem to storyboard the dastardly deed. Unfortunately, the studio has been ransacked by an unknown party; one grainy enlargement remains, wedged between two pieces of furniture. Thomas explains to his neighbor Patricia (Sarah Miles) that the print depicts the murder victim's body lying prone on the grass. However, she sees nothing of the sort, just a collection of dots that resembles one of the abstract expressionist spatter paintings created by her boyfriend. Context is everything, and without the other images, Patricia cannot see what Thomas sees, even when he points out the body in the print. This scene foreshadows the film's most devastating moment, when Thomas, having floundered his way through a nocturnal London landscape of indolent rock concerts and pot-fogged parties, returns to the park in the morning, only to discover that the body has vanished. Has Thomas been conned, or has he conned himself?

Nearly a decade later, Hemmings recalled his role in this film with Deep Red, which also features a protagonist who sees a clue he does not understand. Where Dario Argento is fixated on the inadequacy of memory and the intellect, however, Antonioni's cynicism is directed towards our imperfect organs, both biological and mechanical. The eye and the camera are to be mistrusted. Blow-Up serves as a marvelous time capsule of an unmistakable pop cultural moment, but its obsessions go far beyond the mod bric-a-brac that litters the frame. Just as Michael Haneke would do forty years later in Caché, Antonioni is engaged in a cinematic dissertation on artifice, and on the limitations and vulnerabilities of observation. The world of fashion emerges as a natural backdrop for the film's deeply skeptical stance towards images as a substitute for reality, and towards humankind's ability to discern truth with its own lying eyes. In this, there are echoes of Blow-Up in later works as diverse as JFK (recall that bravura sequence of the Life photo forgery) and the documentary Standard Operating Procedure, but Antonioni's film is novel in the manner in which is at once revels in surface imagery and undermines it at every turn.

Rabbit Hole

2010 // USA // John Cameron Mitchell // January 26, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

B- - Everything that occurs within Rabbit Hole revolves around a personal cataclysm that is only hinted at for the first twenty minutes or so of the film, a stratagem that proves wholly consistent with the work's interest in the phenomena of emotional evasion and suppression. The young son of polished upper-middle-class strivers Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) perished eight months ago in a car accident, and although their life is not necessarily in tatters, the couple's unresolved grief crouches in the room, mocking their hollow gestures towards normalcy. John Cameron Mitchell--creator of brash and bratty indie gambits like Hedwig and Angry Inch and Shortbus--isn't the obvious choice to helm David Lindsay-Abaire's adaptation of his own play. While Mitchell's direction is assured and sensitive to the nuances and diversity of human emotion, Rabbit Hole too often feels like a grimly dutiful exploration of a character blueprint, rather than an authentic tale of sorrow. For a story about unthinkable loss, it exhibits a curious lack of poignancy, one that cannot be explained entirely by Becca's ruthless shuttering of her emotional landscape. It's a distinguished film, but frigidly so, and rarely distinctive, apart from its embrace of a curious, scientific sort of solace befitting a faithless world.