The Queen
Stephen Frears’ The Queen begins with an epigraph from Shakespeare: “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” The association with classical tragedy is audacious, and the film’s great achievement is that it undermines and complicates that association in a very contemporary way.The movie begins with the ascension of Tony Blair and his “modernizing” Labour government; the meat of it takes place in the two weeks following the death of divorced Princess Diana, as the royal family fails to apprehend the public dimension of the princess’ death and finds itself needing advice from the striving, smiling prime minister.
Almost the entire thing is shot in interiors. It could be a stage play, divided between the royals hunting and taking tea at their Scottish summer home and the Prime Minister working in his casual, frenetic, first-name-basis offices and slouching about his “constituency”, or household, where he’s so modern as to do his own dishes. (Really?) There’s really only one sweeping exterior shot, a helicopter fly-by of the Scottish cliffs where Charles and Diana’s children stalking a stag. In its way, it doesn’t break the pattern of alternating interiors between the public offices of the Prime Minister and the cloisters of the royals: this landscape, after all, is just another private room in the House of Windsor.
The lead actors’ work is uniformly perfect, especially Helen Mirren’s as the Queen, and the movie asks on some level for empathy with the royal family. It accomplishes this: the royals represent the last gasps of the Stiff Upper Lip, and they are pained to find themselves estranged from an emotional and demonstrative public, even more captive to the spectacle of Diana in death than they were in life. But the seams and spans, however ill-fitting, of the dress of private grief do not make royal tragedies.
Intercut with the interiors at Downing Street and Balmoral are real bites of video footage, from CNN and the BBC and half a dozen other news agencies, of the country’s and the world’s reaction to the Princess’ death. The public haunts the movie but does not exactly appear in it. Blair may be the Queen’s subject, but he does not represent the public, who have no more of a stand-in in The Queen than does the storm in King Lear. Rather, the public becomes context, and it unmoors the royals from their thousand years of precedents and power.
Laying seas of cellophane-wrapped flowers and Mylar balloons at Buckingham Palace, mediated through grainy video, the public is a storm, a force of nature (post-nature?) that structures the conflict of the film. Diana, famously a ‘candle in the wind’, gives over to it, amplifies it, and succumbs to it (an early statement from the royals lays the blame squarely at the feet of the media; Blair’s oily-genius communications director clucks, “that’s not who you want to blame”). The Queen suspects it will blow over, that she has no more to fear from it than do the cliffs at Balmoral. Only Blair understands it perfectly: he knows that this wind, ill or true, can be neither turned nor controlled, but it can be sailed. His wife, a “known anti-monarchist”, hopes that the public’s souring feeling towards the royals will result in their abolishment, but Blair knows that his New Labour isn’t so revolutionary (he chastises his staff for including the R-word in a speech). Canny and empathetic at the same time, he rides the public’s feeling, absorbing its power but knowing that it does not crave the abolition of the royals, just the royals’ recognition of themselves.
Of course, it’s nothing new. Hobbes insisted that the King’s right comes not from on high but compiles the people’s will from below. Blair agrees: he doesn’t think the royals are going anywhere, he just understands them better.
posted by Josh K-sky at
6:50 PM
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