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foreign report
Hollywood in the mirror
The Queen's biopic is a US success because many in the movie
business see themselves in her travails
By Mark Lawson
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Since
Elizabeth II's advisers started working to make her seem more in tune
with the public mood, it has become customary for her to send congratulations
to Britain's Academy Award nominees. But this harmless gesture of
modernity will have had the flunkeys in a kerfuffle this year because
the UK's Oscar triumph this week was the six nominations for a movie
about the attempts by Elizabeth's advisers to make her seem more in
tune with the public mood.
The extraordinary international success of The Queen is an interesting
mystery. The distinguished directing career of Stephen Frears has
been properly crowned by the rare achievement of gaining Best Director
and Best Film nominations, but The Queen isn't his best film (My Beautiful
Laundrette and Dirty Pretty Things are superior). Meanwhile, Helen
Mirren's unravelling television detective, Jane Tennison, for which
she has now gained every acting honour on the planet, is emotionally
and technically a harder part than this one. |
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So what is it about this film that has made it such a beloved commodity.
Mirren, in her acknowledgments of recognition, has made a precise
and intriguing distinction: "People are not showing their love
for me, but for the Queen".
The business of acting involves an effort of empathy that often leads
performers to become defence attorneys for the person they are playing,
even if it's Stalin or Hitler. Even so, it's odd that Mirren seems
to assume that box office receipts and acting gongs are automatically
a standing ovation for the character.
For most of its length, The Queen depicts a chilly, stubborn, historically
anachronistic woman who reluctantly submits to the feel-good bullying
of a prime minister who she despises as a pushy upstart. Can Mirren
really be right that we come out feeling "love" for this
icy and isolated figure? Certainly it would be surprising, given the
politics and tone of Frears's other films, if he thought he was making
such a positive biopic.
It's true that Peter Morgan's screenplay includes one highly dramatic,
but massively apocryphal, sequence in which the Queen is deputed to
the anti-hunting cause, trying to save a stag from the guns of her
husband and grandsons. It's reported that this metaphorical swapping
of the crown for a balaclava causes particular chortles among members
of the royal household who have seen the film. "She'd have shot
it and hung it on the wall," one roared, although it's possible
that this fantasy helped to assuage the republican worries of America's
cinematic electorates.
Mirren and Frears may also have been helped in the US by another democratic
intervention: the calculated downshift in the monarch's accent. Given
that Princes William and Harry were recently subtitled on American
television when announcing the memorial concert for their mother,
it's likely that Mirren would not be needing so many evening dresses
at the moment if she had adopted her subject's actual voice.
Yet in concluding that audiences love the woman she depicts, Mirren
is in line with the most popular explanation for her film's success:
that Americans feel nostalgia or crown-envy towards monarchy. Some
Parisian critics have argued the same in relation to admiration the
movie received in France. But, in America especially, it seems odd
that a portrayal of dynastic rule would be popular at the exact time
that most voters seem to be regretting giving power to a former head
of state's son.
My own theory is that The Queen is liked, especially by the Hollywood
residents who have voted for it in such numbers, because it is seen
as a hymn to individualism and self-determination.
Admittedly this may seem an odd moral to draw from a movie about a
woman running a country by divine right and bloodline. But forget
for a moment the job the central character has and the film can be
seen as the story of a celebrity who is trying to deal with a traumatic
family situation in private, according to her own lights. For this
she finds herself mocked and bullied by the media, caught between
the strategies of advisers and, worst of all, told what to do by a
politician, currently the world's most despised profession.
Many of the actors, actresses and directors of Hollywood, sitting
over their Oscar ballot papers, may have recognised aspects of this
situation in their own careers, having themselves been victims of
tabloid editorials, fickle aides and the government. They see Elizabeth
II as an example of that cherished plotline in American cinema: The
Star Who Came Through.
The Queen's success is not, as some have argued, because America secretly
wants to be a monarchy or, as Mirren has suggested, because people
have fallen in love with the character she plays, but because the
movie queens of Hollywood see themselves reflected in her.
Courtesy: The Guardian
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