The King's Speech

I posted a few days ago about worrying that my anticipation of True Grit would prevent me from enjoying it, that my expectation of a great movie would prevent me from enjoying a good one.  Luckily, True Grit turned out to be just as good as I hoped it would be.  Unluckily, what I feared would play out with True Grit played out on a small scale with The King's Speech - which stinks!  Because the movie really is very good, with exceptional performances from Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter.  But when you go into a movie expecting it to be great and transcendent and all of those good words you associate with movies you love and remember for a long time, you find yourself focusing on the ways the movie wasn't-great-and-transcendant instead of focusing on all the ways it was really quite good.  Or at least that's what I do. 

I'll try not to do that as much here.  So first, the positives!

• Colin Firth.  So great.  I read an article about the movie where Geoffery Rush said that what he found most impressive about Colin Firth's performance was that he didn't play a man with a stutter, he played a man desperate to communicate.  Anyone who's watched A Single Man or even that scene in Pride and Prejudice where Mr. Darcy watches Elizabeth Bennett play the piano knows that Colin Firth excels at expressing powerful emotions hid behind deep reserve.  What impressed me here was how well he played the less reserved moments in this movie; Bertie's angry fits, high-handed set-downs, admittedly bad temper.  I could see an actor being precious with these moments, trying to underscore the character's noble suffering, but instead he plays them as a man who's frustrated and angry, who acts out in unpleasant, unattractive, but very human ways.  His performance made the movie for me.  
• Helena Bonham Carter made me regret wondering out loud earlier this year if she could do anything other than Wacky Women in Tim Burton Movies.  She's wonderfully warm and charming in all of her scenes, even - and maybe especially - the scenes where she displays a bit of royal haughtiness, such as when she refers to Wallis Simpson as That Woman, or her gracious decline of an invitation to dinner at the Logues' house.  I really found myself wanting to see more of her.  I would totally watch the prequel to this movie, or a sequel, focusing on these characters.  Bertie and Elizabeth: A Love Story. Who's with me?
• Call me corny, but I kind of dug that the ultimate stakes of this movie concerned a person's desire to live up to what others expected of him, needed from him.  It's kind of a romantic, old-fashioned desire, and it was kind of refreshing to see in a movie today.  
• The final scene worked tremendously well in tying together a lot of the threads of the movie in a satisfying way.  NGL: I got a bit choked up!

And now, not to be Debbie Downer, but the few minor things that kept the movie from being super-duper-amazing-great the way I wanted it to be.

• This probably sounds super picky, but there were a few showy camera angles that distracted me from the scenes as I watched them.  I tend to feel like if you're noticing what the director is doing in a scene, then the director has messed up.  That happened a couple of times and pulled me out of the movie in ways I didn't really care for.
• Geoffery Rush gives a charismatic performance as Lionel Logue, but I felt like the journey of his character through the movie wasn't as well drawn as I'd have liked.  He's introduced as a former actor, shown auditioning for and failing to get a part in a play.  By the end the actor thread has kind of been dropped, aside from how the revelation of how acting led to him becoming a speech therapist.  I couldn't tell if we were supposed to take his journey to be one of moving away from his attachment to his old profession to embracing the meaning in his second one, or maybe that wasn't meant to be a thread at all?  I'm not sure. I felt like the movie would have been elevated into great-transcendent-awesome if I'd had a bit more of a handle on his character.

You know, those concerns really are minor given all the great things in the movie.  I wish the Oscar movies weren't all released within a four-week period because I feel like it messes up my perceptions of movies, and causes me to go into a lot of them with outsized expectations.  Can't let expectations of perfection prevent enjoyment of the really-very-good!