Week Six: The Queen

The Queen

2006

Directed by Stephen Frears

Starring Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, James Cromwell

*********************

I’m a born and raised American citizen. What that means is I have been instilled with a latent confusion and distaste for monarchies. The people who built this country watched their friends die face down in the mud so we wouldn’t have to fund a bunch of poncy hunting expeditions and keeping the lights on for a landed aristocracy. I was brought up believing that it was better to live free, and to pay my taxes to a government which will then distribute that money to a bunch of landed aristocrats who spend it on hunting expeditions. Irony. I love it!

But seriously, the inner workings of the English monarchy have never held much interest for me. Call me sexist, but this is a subject I’ve felt has always been more interesting to the women in my life of all ages. I don’t necessarily think less of monarchs, but the entire song and dance just seems like an unnecessary production in the modern age. If the citizens of a state feel it necessary to fund such excesses and are able to find meaning in having a figurehead to act as the state’s parents, that’s fine. England is entitled to its monarchy, until the citizens decide that they’d rather be done with it. If and when that occurs, one would hope it leads to dramatically less bloodshed than in the case of Revolutionary France.

Not this again!

What the hell am I going on about now? The Queen is a film about a remarkable week in English history when the common citizens of that nation, for a brief period, would have probably had global support for breaking down the fences to Buckingham Palace and throttling Queen Elizabeth II for her apparent disregard over the death of Princess Diana. Now, this is an event which I can only dimly recall. I was nine at the time, lived in North Dakota, and was honestly more interested in Goosebumps books than some princess. I had never really looked into the topic since then, allowing my imagination to fill in the blanks. It was a national tragedy for a royal and attractive person to die, and then Elton John happened to it. End of story. Apparently it was a little more complicated.

The film was directed by Stephen Frears, a man whose name I would have skipped over on a list of the other directors who will come up (some repeatedly) in this endeavor. The only work of his I am familiar with, prior to this one, would be High Fidelity, a movie I have not seen and probably starred John Cusack. Could be totally wrong there. Regardless, there’s some interesting things done here that could be attributed to Mr. Frears. The story could be boiled down to a conflict of styles, interests, ages, outlooks on life, classes, genders, and several other big concepts, between Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth Rex and Sheen’s Tony Blair, described aptly as having a Cheshire cat smile and generally looking like a sock-sniffer throughout. Blair had apparently been just elected to the office of Prime Minister on a general wave of anti-monarchist sentiment and a national interest in a nebulous “modernization”, and is surrounded by insufferable people. Elizabeth II had been in power since the Truman administration (for reference to my American readers), and had been watching former Princess Diana gallivanting about like a celebrity for some time prior to her death. What follows is a fictionalized accounting of how Blair and the Queen sought to navigate what were then untrodden waters of a global outpouring of grief, whipped up by the very tabloids which were probably to blame for her death, over a person who had divorced herself out of the monarchy.

There’s a lot of interesting character conflicts going on here, and it was fun to watch these characters hack out some sort of working compromise. Blair is made to work with, and ultimately to sympathize with an institution he was nominally elected to shake up a bit. The Queen, in turn, is pushed to bow to popular sentiments and accept that she doesn’t live in the 1940s anymore. There are other characters talking into ears, most notably the stellar James Cromwell as Prince Phillip, but the story is really just two people at opposite ends of their own popularity. This is important, because the environment in which this film was created (which I can recall) was at the end of Tony Blair’s tarnished administration, near the assumption of the short-lived Gordon Brown government, and a general return of sympathy and respect for the institution of the English monarchy. The final exchange between Mirren and Sheen is a general dressing down of Prime Minister Blair, and a reminder that the Queen has seen a lot of men walk in with a popular mandate. They generally left 10 Downing Street under dubious circumstances.

My cat died yesterday. He was a good friend and I had grown to love him quite a bit. Why does that matter? I bring it up because I expected this film to be more about watching the head of the English monarchy dealing with grief over somebody she had cared about a great deal. This film was certainly not that. It was instead a well-written fictionalized account of that eventful week in English history, one with a pretty good score and a nuanced performance by Mirren. That she herself was not supportive of the monarchy in the period this film analysed is an interesting anecdote; a more interesting one is that the actual Queen of England would invite Mirren to the palace after the release of this film. How’s that for modern?

IS IT ANY GOOD. Yes. The cinematography is workmanlike, and occasionally you will wince as Cromwell comes off as less of an Englishman and more of…well, more James Cromwell. There’s also some weird tonal problems at the outset where the film seemed to be a little overly lighthearted for where I knew it was going. These, however, are minor road bumps in a film experience which (to gauge my interest) I only put down to grab and reheat my very large cup of coffee. It also clocks in at less than two hours, and features a wonderfully cathartic scene of Sheen dressing down a little snot-nosed Labour prick during Diana’s funeral procession. Feels good, man.

SHOULD IT HAVE WON? NO. Let me tell you about this movie I like, a movie that came out in 2006. It’s called Children of Men, and it’s the best movie of the last decade. It’s a movie that has everything. EVERYTHING. Want me to prove it? Alright. Does it have allusions to Pink Floyd album art? Yep. Does it have Michael Caine portraying a delightful stoner? Yep. Is it set in a dystopian vision of the near future? Hell yes. Does it have a man being murdered by a cinder block in the single most visceral kill scene I can recall? Absolutely. Does it have two of the most carefully crafted extended scenes you will ever see, scenes of action happening around what had to have been the most talented Handicam operators on the planet. Yes, it did. Finally, does it have Julianne Moore, the most beautiful actress?

Yes, and she spits a ping pong ball back and forth with Clive Owen in a moving vehicle. It’s adorable.

Leave this blog right now, and go watch Children of Men. You will become a better human being. You could do worse than The Queen, though. Especially considering they totally gave Best Picture to The Departed as a way of thanking Scorsese for not making more Gangs of New York-style schlock.

Next week, I’m finally going to watch Brokeback Mountain. Rather than have the balls to give this movie its props, the Academy elected to show off how it wasn’t racist anymore! D’aww!

Other thoughts

• I’ve handled pet grieving pretty well, all things considered. His name was Ernesto Superfly Czernobog Hellcat Daisycupcakes Turds, and he was about fifteen years old. He hated people food, would drink water out of my cups, and loved to explore this big, crazy world. The time I got to spend with him was pretty rad. I’m not going to be in a place where I can handle having a different cat in his place for a while, but I will get there some day.
• Elton John as a person is alright. I like the idea of Elton John. The music though? Not really doing anything for me.
• This week LP Archive recommendation is a special one, the first I ever read. Animal Crossing seemed a thing I’d never understand or care about, then I read Chewbot’s dark take on the game and became a believer.

I’ve always heard a lot of good things about Animal Crossing, but I never owned a Gamecube. When it was released on the DS it received such positive reviews that I decided to give it a shot, despite the fact that it appears to have been created for small children suffering from down’s syndrome and ADD.

I was not prepared for the shit that goes on in this children’s game. The result is this.

I’ve documented the journey of Billy, a young, happy lad who believes he’s going off to have fantastic adventures at summer camp. The following images have not been altered in any way (other than to rescale them or to identify which dialog option is being chosen).

This is a literal and practically contextual account of what happens to poor bastards sent to Animal Crossing.

This is the true story of Billy.

After playing the game a bit, I could understand why writing this makes sense.