Congratulations are in order to everyone involved with The King’s Speech after its Oscar haul on Sunday. And commiserations to the losers, although at least David Fincher and his colleagues on The Social Network can content themselves with the certainty that they have made a film which will still be relished and scrutinised once The King’s Speech has gone the way of Driving Miss Daisy, Out of Africa, Chariots of Fire and all the other Oscar-laden middlebrow master-classes languishing in prestigious oblivion.
Best Picture winners fall into various categories (including the “It’s About Time” camp, which can benefit anything from Scorsese’s The Departed to the third and least deserving Lord of the Rings instalment, or the “They Do Make ‘Em Like That Any More” vote which enabled The Sting, Chicago and Gladiator to win). By and large, with exceptions like The Godfather Part II and The Hurt Locker, the Best Picture needs to represent some kind of balm. That might be embodied by the subject matter, which tends toward the familiar — the historical, biographical or literary. It could be there in the tone, which should be reassuring (even One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which won at the height of the American New Wave, packaged counter-culture rebellion in a way that the aged Hollywood orthodoxy could applaud). It may even be simply in the warmth of the characters, which is my theory for how No Country For Old Men, brutal for the most part but anchored by a meditative, sympathetic Tommy Lee Jones, came to beat the transparently superior There Will Be Blood, which is bereft of anyone to cherish or root for.
In this context, The King’s Speech can be viewed as not so much a movie as a machine to win Oscars. It is, from first frame to last, an extended exercise in comfort; it’s all balm. It has a cosmetically massaged historical background, purged of any messy details, and divided into heroes and rogues. It has characters whose only purpose is to send waves of warmth off the screen and toward us in the auditorium — characters who have struggles and moments of uncertainty, but nothing to dent or compromise their decency. Where is the tension? The tension is in the question of whether the speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) will cure King George VI (Colin Firth) of his stammer. Spoiler alert: he does. As James Franco — admittedly not an unbiased observer given that his film 127 Hours, directed by Danny Boyle, was up against The King’s Speech in several categories — put it: “It’s a success story. Is he going to make the speech? You know he’s going to get it. He has a little coach, like Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid, and he gets through it and makes the speech. It’s pretty safe.”
He’s right, of course. (Even better was the New Yorker‘s Richard Brody, who described the film on Twitter as a “prune stew of a movie”.) And beneath that Karate Kid surface runs an overly cute strain of class tension which appears to play in favour of the commoner’s irreverence, and its potential to cut through royal pomp and formality. Not so. Logue, and the film, are deferential to the last. Rather than insisting on an essential equality between its characters, the film celebrates the class system and the monarchy’s intrinsic oppression of their subjects. Nothing quite grates like the reaction shots of Logue as he savours his magnificent patient, or the coy comedy of manners that unfolds when Mrs Logue stumbles upon royalty in her living room, and fumbles the necessary etiquette. In their vulnerability, and their smiling tolerance of ordinary folk, the image of the royal family today and throughout history is fortified by the movie. There isn’t a critical, insightful or searching frame in its entire running time. It is a natural Best Picture winner.
No wonder it swiped the main prize from The Social Network. Fincher’s film offers no certainties, no pat conclusions, no life lessons, no succour. It doesn’t tell us whom to cheer or hiss. It doesn’t try to improve us or stir us: it digs into human behaviour at its murkiest and most suspect, and invites us to arrive at our own conclusions about its characters. What nerve. How any of us ever thought a film like that could have beaten The King’s Speech is beyond me. It’s almost touching, really, the faith that we fans of Fincher’s film had in the plain power of its excellence. Such footling considerations as quality, daring and vision matter not to the voters, many of whom will have helped Shakespeare in Love secure its victory over The Thin Red Line, or Dances With Wolves trounce GoodFellas.
The Best Picture winner must, wherever possible, be as safe and innocuous and fragrant as a Radox bath. The King’s Speech is all those things and frothy with it. As a critic I cannot applaud such a hollow film. But as an exercise in how to win Best Picture, and send audiences home from the cinema feeling coddled, it is a masterpiece of calculation and cynicism. No wonder David Cameron is proud to stand behind it.
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