The King's Speech - 2010 - 3 Stars

Director: Tom Hooper
Cast: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter

The King's Speech is an adequate, but forgettable historical drama that is well acted and has direction that I could charitably describe as competent. If I didn't feel like indulging my extra-textual whims that sentence would be a sufficient review of The King's Speech. However, I do feel like indulging and The King's Speech won the Oscar for Best Picture, so i'd like to discuss how The King's Speech awards success affected my perception of it.

Let's get this out of the way first, The King's Speech was not the best movie of 2010. Of the other Best Picture nominees I have seen, TKS is my least favourite (I haven't seen 127 Hours or Winter's Bone) and there are many non-nominees I prefer to TKS. I am no longer surprised when the tastes of Oscar voters don't line up with mine, but the success of TKS is a pure distillation of the differences in our tastes and I found that hard to ignore as I watched the film. It  is a period piece about a historical figure with a disability. Its major theme is the power of theatre and performance and its narrative centrepiece is a minor historical event in real life, but one that that implicitly wins World War II for the allies in the film's world.

What bothers me the most about these types of films is that people assume since they are historical they are in some way educational or mature. The King's Speech is an underdog sports story with a pipe and a monocle, but those accessories don't compensate for it being formally dull or make it thematically richer.

That its major theme is the power of performance theatre makes its award success even more grating. It's self congratulatory to celebrate a movie with those themes, but even more off-putting to celebrate the acting in these films. Firth's performance is great, but it's masturbatory to congratulate a professional actor for convincingly playing someone who doesn't even have basic elocution skills. Thank you for allowing my indulgences, we can now return to our regularly scheduled review.

The King's Speech is an adequate, but forgettable historical drama that is well acted and has direction that I could charitably describe as competent.