The Queen
by Shari L. Rosenblum

Sitting for a portrait in the opening sequence of Stephen Frears’ docudrama named for her character, Helen Mirren presents an Elizabeth II at once rigid and regal, as if the two were interchangeable, but her eyes flash intelligence and unexpected wit, and from her lips there is something of the wistful and sardonic.  The camera passes from the woman to the canvas—where the black backdrop, incomplete, hovers around the royal image like a deep dark aura—and back to the woman, who chatters to the artist airily about the election of prime minister and the excitement of the vote.  Momentarily, the frame captures both person and painting, encapsulating the depth and rolling dimensions between private and public images—the film’s ultimate subject—and then settles comfortably on the comfortable face of The Queen (Mirren’s performance already awe-inspiring).

A portrait in itself, Frears’ film, from a masterful screenplay by Peter Morgan (who also co-wrote The Last King of Scotland), peeks beneath the royal countenance in a moment of transition, from the first official meeting with the newly elected head of government (Michael Sheen), part evaluation, part intimidation (“Winston Churchill sat where you are sitting”) to the concessionary bow to the clamor of the crowds in the aftermath of the death of Princess Di.  From Henry IV, the film’s ominous epigraph, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

The British have always tended to confound their ideas of monarchy and their idea of the monarch, and rarely has either seemed so antiquated or out of touch as they did in the last years of the 20th century, when Tony Blair, Labour saviour, came into office and Princess Diana, escaped from the Tower, came into her own.   Even more than the would-be great modernizer, whose down home “Call me Tony” sensibility marked a stark contrast to Windsor formalities, the ex-queen-to-be courted the people’s favor with the unbeatable combination of good will, good fashion sense, and anti-affinal gestalt on tell-all t.v.  When the paparazzi pursued her unto death in a Paris tunnel in 1997, her tabloid popularity became a matter of political import to the crown.  A fact it would seem the crown was slow to realize, and—if the filmmakers are to be believed—perhaps took note of only on the incessant urgings of the increasingly self-assured and mystifyingly sympathetic Mr. Blair. 

The Royal response fell out of step with public pathos from the moment news of Diana’s death reached them in their beds.  While Blair’s team set out immediately to woo the crowds with its compassion—raising the “people’s princess” from the ashes of the fractured fairy tale—the Queen refused to make any statement at all, holding the matter to be a private one for the Spencer family, to which Diana was rightly returned upon divorce from Prince Charles.  While the people, spurred by the press, grew ever more demonstrative, laying flowers at the Kensington Palace gate and camping out in throngs (the news reports in Sydney, where I was at the time, reported that the British were behaving like Americans . . . ), the Queen retired from London to Victoria’s “dear paradise in the Highlands,” the country estate at Balmoral.  And all the while during that long week, Blair prodded protocol and Charles (Alex Jennings, spinelessly stiff and little boy sly), out of concern for his children, his life and his role as heir apparent, pled for a change in the figurehead’s heart.

The subject, and the subjects (both cinematic and political) are ripe for satire—the clash of the ancient and the here-and-now, the dance between elected and inherited powers, the brash young buck and the aging matron, the maternal monarch and her true-born and contingent sons—but Morgan’s writing and Frears’ direction deliberately eschew pointed twists, mean-spirited digs and self-righteous zingers.  Priding themselves on their meticulous research, some among Palace and Downing Street sources never to be named, they find their bite instead in the natural humor of circumstance, in the literal (with)drawing room comedy of manners.  Filling in the fiction behind the fact, theirs is a straightforward depiction of the heads of state at their homes and in their dressing gowns (the Queen is shown more than once under covers and in her housefrock), generous in its willingness to lay bare without eviscerating.

Mirren is an absolute marvel, every inch the Queen without an ounce of mimickry, never releasing the royal posture even as bewilderment dashes her expression, the strongest of emotions just a flicker in her eyes.  She manages, conform to the filmmakers’ wishes, to change our impression of the Queen without changing the image of the Queen in the process.   Playing “Cabbage” to James Cromwell’s unyielding Prince Philip (the least forgiving portrayal in the film), defensive of his bride and his pride and unmoved by public din, in the role of worried daughter seeking the counsel of Queen Mum (Sylvia Syms, somewhat miffed and somewhat dotty), or face to face with a majestic hunted stag, she humanizes the monarch simply by allowing her to breathe.  It is a performance to behold, matched in vigor, if not in style, by Sheen, reprising his role as Blair from the Frears/Morgan made for British t.v. drama “The Deal.” The Queen’s Blair is not yet tainted by the events of later years (though the film does allude with a wink to the coming change in tide).  He is still the bright-eyed hope, and Sheen endears himself in a believably fresh-faced naïveté mixed with eager manipulation, casualness his calling card and earnestness his trump.  To the dismay of his cheeky wife Cherie (Helen McCrory in a delectable turn), known antiroyalist of the shallow curtsy and republican glare, and his press secretary (Tim McMullan, mercenarily pragmatic as Alastair Campbell), he begins to get, and get into, the monarch’s mystique.  “Will someone please save these people from themselves,” he sighs exasperatedly when first met with resistance from inside the sheltered walls, but soon it is he who takes on the task, the Labour god gone ga-ga who would save the queen.

Though no actor portrays her, archival footage brings the Princess and the media frenzy into the fore—Diana in her bridal gown, Diana in tears, Diana friend of the unfortunate, and darling of the celebrity circuit (shots of Tom Cruise and Elton John mark the moment), Diana cast out of the castle and Diana canonized by the press.  In the background and on the sidelines, in the unfilled spaces in the private royal quarters, between the Prime Minister and the Queen, the constructed Diana becomes a constant presence in Frears’ film, the real Diana lost to history, and the real gaps between the two nothing more now than a myth.  It took four days from her death for the Royal Family to release a statement—the bulk of Frears’ film—another day for the Queen to lower her crown in Diana’s forum, before the public mourners on broadcast t.v., bestowing a grudging honor on the “exceptional and gifted human being” who was the mother to her grandchildren.  “Are these things then necessities?” Henry IV decrees in the scene that follows the film’s epigraph.  “Then let us meet them like necessities.”