Canter Bridge

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Few books or films about a living monarch can avoid caricature. Royalty as a fact on the ground runs so contrary to the spirit of modernity—yet there they are!—and still holds such sentimental power for many ‘subjects’. The result is the virtual impossibility of a civil discussion about gradated pros and cons.

Into this moral sloshing about strides Stephen Frears’ The Queen, a movie best remembered for the command performance (queens usually ask for such a thing rather than providing it) of Dame Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II. Almost predictably, the film lurches into the tendency to create and caricature villains: Cherie Blair and Prince Philip come off as genuine awfuls occupying opposite extremes of the ideological spectrum. Prince Charles and Alisdair Campbell are almost as bad, though for different reasons.

One might argue that Fears did not create those villains, simply portrayed them within an acceptable range of their already existing awfulness. This is plausible. Most of us will never know because we will never know them.

Yet I find The Queen a gripping film because of its superb narration of a dialogue-of-wary-respect between Blair and the Queen. Mrs Blair even accuses the young prime minister of ‘going over’ to the royals just as all Labour MPs have gone ‘gaga’ when given access to them (her claim, not mine).

A word of parenthesis: this American reviewer was living in England at the time of Diana’s death, the occasioning fact of this cinematic drama. My family and I had no particular opinion regarding Diana and certainly did not revere her. Yet we found ourselves caught up in the astonishing emotional outpouring that gripped Great Britain and to some extent the wider world in the week following her death. Something happened outside a Paris tunnel that week that none of us would have anticipated and that few understand to this day.

It is easy for me to imagine that Blair’s conversations with the Queen were just about as Fears depicts them and that this was one of those positive outcomes that occasionally ensue when two people of strong character invade each other’s company because of circumstances that neither one would have chosen.

I find the physical, visual portrayal of Blair unconvincing, though this is hardly fatal to the movie’s success. Helen Mirren as the Queen, on the other hand, seems almost eerily true to fact.

This flawed but ultimately stirring movie is worth owning and returning to from time to time as distance readjusts the lens on a memory that remains unshakably present for those of us who lived through the events at close hand.