+ For the crown, the death of Diana represented an
unprecedented quandary. Having divorced Prince Charles, she was no longer,
technically, a royal. Nor were Elizabeth and, especially, her imperious husband
Phillip, inclined to celebrate the life of someone they’d come to regard most
uncharitably. Instead, they holed up in their country estate. The contrast
between the young prime minister and the aging queen mirrors the gulf between
the royals’ and the public’s view of the crown’s role in the age of celebrity.
In other words, the people expected a gesture of grief to mirror theirs. I’ve
never understood myself why an accident of birth should make someone worthy of
all that attention, which put me in the odd position of relating, in this case,
to the queen’s stance. Yet if I can’t say Frears made me
understand the depth of feeling engendered by the martyred
princess, he does make it palpable. Mixing real footage with the fictional
helps convey the genuine sadness felt by millions.
Of course, a great deal
attention will deservedly focus on Mirren, whose Elizabeth is a believable mix
of the earthy (she drives her own Range Rover) and the reserved. Sheen is a
pretty effective Blair, although in his earliest scene, meeting the queen, he
seems such a Pee Wee Herman-esque pipsqueak that it seemed hard to believe this
was a man who’d just won a landslide victory. Nonetheless, the movie winds up
as a mash note to an emerging statesman, with only the queen’s comment in the
epilogue alluding to Blair’s now-sullied reputation.
- Just once or twice
I thought the movie was slow as it inexorably leads toward the self-abnegation
by the monarch.
= ***1/2 Not quite a
political film, not quite a biographical one, this is a blend of character
drama and cultural history lesson that made me interested in an episode I’d
utterly ignored when it happened.
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