Acid Reign

Failure to communicate: Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) cannot comprehend the public's outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana. (Laurie Sparham/Miramax Films/Alliance Atlantis)

Queen Elizabeth II is much imitated. Scott Thompson does her very well; most holidays, someone around my own dinner table will deliver a semi-drunken royal address: “My loyal shubjects ...” Luckily, none of these people was permitted to play Elizabeth in the taut, fascinating film The Queen. Instead, Helen Mirren got the job, and the wonder of the performance — and as she is in every scene, her performance begets the wonder of the film — is that she does not imitate, she acts. How novel; someone alert Jamie Foxx.

The fictionalized film begins the morning after Tony Blair has earned a landslide Labour victory in the election of 1997. Protocol dictates that before he is made Prime Minister, Blair (Michael Sheen) must literally appear on bended knee before the Queen in a bizarre reverse-wedding proposal and wait for her to ask him to lead the country, will of the people be damned. This first meeting at Buckingham Palace sees the two at their worst: gummy Blair is nervous and sycophantic, and the Queen is aloof to the point of iciness. She’s been briefed about his efforts to “modernize” England and withholds any fellow feeling; the meeting is under her military-style command. Frost practically coats the chandeliers as she pointedly announces: “You are my 10th Prime Minister.” Good luck, buddy.

Yet the Queen is not a total bee-yatch; she is lightly amused by Cherie Blair’s lazy curtsey — Cherie (Helen McCrory) harps on her husband with boring anti-monarchist rants — and Her Majesty describes herself with Churchill as “a shy, quiet girl at the knee of a great man.” The line is either a brilliant manipulation or an off-the-cuff comment, if the Queen is capable of such a thing, but either way, its self-deprecation disarms Blair, planting the seed that grows into sympathy for her.

For those of you expecting as eviscerating a portrait of the Royals as that painted in the tabloids the last few years, blame director Stephen Frears for your disappointment. His is a warts-and-all, quietly hilarious approach — the Windsors are only as dysfunctional as most families — but he is not exactly voyeuristic; no shots of the Queen showering, swearing, letting loose. Does the queen shower, swear and let loose? Probably not, though she might bathe on occasion. Rather than simply being horrible, she is presented as decided, a privilege not only of royalty but also of the aged.

Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) understands the media better than the Queen. (Laurie Sparham/Miramax Films/Alliance Atlantis)

Mirren achieves a transforming solidity in the part. From her tweedy skirts to her equestrian bow-legged walk, the Queen does not have a flexible bone in her body. “That is how I was raised,” she says often, slamming the door on further discussion. Another favoured phrase: “Quiet dignity,” which she ascribes, with great revisionist optimism, as the mark of the Royal Family. Meanwhile, the Queen Mum is rattling her ice while Prince Charles (beautifully channelled by Alex Jennings), stammering and fretting that he may be assassinated, tries in his sweet, feeble way to tell his mother she’s not affectionate enough (the veiled plea is met with a funny-tragic blank stare).

No wonder the Queen loathed Princess Diana, all uncontained id. When the late-night call of an incident in Paris wakes the palace, aggressively grumpy Prince Philip (James Cromwell) fumes: “What has she done now?” She has, of course, had a fatal accident in a tunnel. As Diana lies dying in a Paris hospital, a distraught Charles asks for the Royal jet but the Queen objects on fiscal grounds. It is the first of many wild misreadings of the people she serves, and soon enough, she must locate that flexible bone: when Diana does die, hours later, the Queen murmurs consent and Charles takes the plane.

The film incorporates real footage from the week of Diana’s death, most of which remains strangely fresh: her doppelganger brother Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, blaming the paparazzi for her death; the cross-class national, then international, mourning; and the growing tide of flowers at the palace gates. But the movie has tricky and unexpected empathies. Diana, in the famous 1995 interview where she said: “There were three of us in this marriage,” looks a little false through her well-batted eyelashes; she is not an entirely convincing victim. Prince Philip, repulsed by her media manipulations, leaves the bedroom in a tiff as the television (always on) runs yet another deifying montage of her life. But the Queen watches from her pillows, scrutinizing these perplexing images of the woman who no longer even belonged to the Royal inner circle: something has changed, but what?

In the days after her death, the Windsors take to their estate in Balmoral. Fresh air is the grandparents’ clueless response to young Will and Harry’s loss, and while the gang is holed up with their upper lips stiff, the world is weeping away. It’s hard to remember that Diana’s death spawned one of the first exhibitions of grief pornography, replete with an Elton John-penned theme song and fame predators like Tom Cruise and Donatella Versace jetting in for the funeral. Blair tries, with exasperation and a filial protective instinct, to explain to the Queen why private grief is outdated, and a public gesture on Diana’s behalf is required. But the warning is unheeded, and England calls for the Queen’s head.

Elizabeth’s genuine befuddlement isn’t entirely the cloistered perspective of the ruling class, but that of an septuagenarian who underestimates the great, gobbling media machine and the Oprah-age need for healing. Instead of hiring a team of publicity flacks, as young Diana might have, the Queen goes into the woods. In an exquisite if unlikely scene, her jeep conks out in a river. As she awaits rescue, it is the rare moment where she is entirely alone, and in that wide-open space, one feels the claustrophobia of royal life. Duty bears down on her, something that Tony Blair, and the filmmakers behind The Queen, understand poetically.

A beautiful stag, whom Philip Fresh Air is off hunting with the boys, suddenly appears in her path, and their eyes meet across the water. The Queen tries to shoo it to safety, this glorious, doomed animal, but in the end, there is nothing she can do to protect it from its fate.

The Queen opens across Canada on Oct. 13.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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