The Queen: Strictly for the proles

What's regal about The Queen are the performances (Helen Mirren's pinched, mordant Elizabeth II, Sylvia Syms as a gin-totin' Queen Mum armed with 1,000 years of tradition and a bagful of trenchant wise cracks, Roger Allam as a harried royal sycophant) and Peter Morgan's salty dialogue. Stephen Frears lights and shoots as if he was directing a Lifetime Movie of the Week, but he's sensitive to nuances; certainly there are many members of the audience for whom the weeklong paroxysm of mourning by Princess Di's purported subjects was a ghastly triumph for modern advertising (and a vindication of Elton John-Bernie Taupin's drippy "Candle in the Wind"), which is exactly what flummoxed Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Implicit in their disbelief is: We knew the smiling twit, okay? Princess schmincess. Note the Royals' twitching during Lord Spencer (Diana's brother)'s funeral oration, a compendium of platitudes. We sympathize! I also enjoyed one recurring gag: Elizabeth is shown at her disk, with impeccable posture, writing in her diary. We expect to hear her thoughts read in tedious voice-over. That Frears denies us this convention accentuates his point: what bloody kind of interior life could this woman record for her eyes only?

In its cheap way The Queen is as much an antidote to Hollywood's awestruck representations of monarchy as Marie Antoinette. With the exception of those of us who thought Frears' talent had dissipated in the appalling plushness of Mrs. Henderson Presents (its gags were as disgraceful as The Queen's production values), I can't imagine why anyone would get too excited about it.