The Queen: on the dole

As my enmity towards this season's awards wheelbarrow The Queen grows, with Helen Mirren pulling it through the predicted furrows, I'm looking for any chance to read a disparaging review. Jane Dark nails the film's overdeliberate quality (without any of the fun and malice of director Stephen Frears' other tightly scripted ensemble The Grifters). While it's true that Frears got his start in TV, he has never succumbed to TV-movie values so helplessly:

That's what "well-made" means, most often, and it's exactly the problem; it's as if the film were trying to make the case for "the art film" being every bit as rigid and determined a genre as anything Hollywood could come up with. At least Hollywood films have the courage of their lack of conviction, and the capacity thus to be excessive, muddled, absurd. There is no moment nor gesture in The Queen that escapes its fate as crudely telegraphic (at the beginning when he's just an uncertain commoner, the quite short person playing Tony Blair wears football jerseys; you can tell he's come into his own because from that moment on, he wears suits!); as a mechanistic part of the parallel plot structure (which guy in the PM's camp is like which guy in the royal retinue? We'll never figure it out!); or as broadly symbolic (the noble old stag being harried in its solitude across the vast spaces of Balmoral, a stag eventually slain not by an aristocrat but a mere businessman hunter up from the City — this noble old stag with which the Queen is obsessed — stands for...the Queen!)

As for Helen Mirren, she did the tight-lipped thing far better in PBS' "Prime Suspect"; and if you want to see her at her uninhibited best, re-screen The Long Good Friday, Excalibur (her Morgan Le Fey was not, unhappily, studied by Cate Blanchett's pixie in Lord of the Rings), and even the underrated The Mosquito Coast, in which she transformed the tiresome part of the long-suffering wife into a cauldron of simmering resentment and repressed sensuality. It's a testament to Frears' dull good taste that we register Mirren's intelligence as Queen Elizabeth, but there's a sizable coterie which chooses not to separate intelligence from charm and sex. How frustrating that this is the role for which Mirren will be forever known.