Stephen Frears’ The Queen is a fascinating and surprisingly entertaining look at how Britain’s royal family was forced to come to terms with their place in the modern world, seemingly overnight. The sudden death of Princess Diana sets off a chain reaction of events that Queen Elizabeth II (an excellent Helen Mirren) could not have possibly anticipated. Regarding this affair as a private family matter, the queen is shocked by the demand for a more public funeral to honor the “people’s princess.” Such a notion is as foreign to the queen and her husband, Prince Philip (James Cromwell), as declaring the crêpe the national pastry of England — and that shows just how out of touch and irrelevant the royals have become.
It’s up to Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) to bridge the gap between the queen and the public — and much of the film’s drama comes from his placating calls to the queen, in which he tries to get her to behave in unfamiliar ways. The portrayal of Blair is hardly flattering, but Sheen does a fine job of showing Blair’s growth as a politician and statesman. Equally good is Cromwell, who proves once again that there’s not a role he can’t bring a degree of conviction to and Alex Jennings as Prince Charles, who longs to be progressive but is checked by his upbringing.
Mirren has received the lion’s share of accolades for her performance, and they are well deserved. She digs deep, showing us a woman caught between tradition and a shift in the social climate she could not predict. Mirren is able to make the audience feel a degree of sympathy for Elizabeth, even when she uses her grandsons as an excuse for not doing what she knows in her heart is right. Remarkably, Mirren finds the humanity in this woman, who can never afford to be human.
This article appears in Nov 23-29, 2006.
