The King's Speech Review: Raise Your Voice

Tom Hooper’s film, The King’s Speech, is far more than a film catering to one spectacular performance. It is a wonderful film filled with wit and insight.

King George VI of Britain (Colin Firth), Bertie to his family, has a terrible stutter. While he is in the shadows as a prince this is only an embarrassment. All the same, he tries to cure it, visiting every specialist he can to no avail. His wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) discovers a therapist with rather unorthodox ideas, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). His therapy is a personal endeavor until Bertie unexpectedly becomes king after his father, King George V (Michael Gambon), dies and his brother, King Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), abdicates the throne. His country is on the eve of war with Hitler and he must find the words to speak for them.

Colin Firth is incredible in this film as Bertie. There is never a moment where his stammer feels false. It feels as though he was born with it. It isn’t the comical stutter that is exaggerated but the painful stammering of someone trapped in their own mind. It’s very hard to watch. When Bertie stammers you can see the frustration in his face. He knows what he wants to say, his mind has made the thoughts, but his body can’t communicate those thoughts – it has betrayed him. Firth’s ability to show this is what makes his performance so brilliant.

Geoffrey Rush is also brilliant as Lionel Logue, the counterpoint to Bertie. Rush imbues the character with such warmth and compassion, yet there is an edge to him. Logue won’t be intimidated by the air of royalty. That’s what makes him important to Bertie. He speaks to him with complete honesty, be it brutal or not. Rush also brings some comedy to the role, making Logue a bit of a scoundrel. All of these things are necessary to break down the barriers that Bertie has erected.

This is a film I expected to be decent with an incredible performance by Firth. However, the film itself is incredible. This isn’t a stuffy period piece where people suppress their emotions. Logue won’t allow for that. He constantly probes deeper to find out what is below the surface, what are the roots that created the stutter. This is handled delicately, steering far clear of melodrama.

There isn’t a big scene where Bertie breaks down and reveals that his father abused him. There is no flashback to when he was a child. Rather we are shown what has given him his stutter: Bertie tries to read through a speech as his father berates him for his stutter, even as a grown man. The only time any deliberate explanation is given it comes from a character moment. Logue notices that Bertie seems awkward while using his right hand and Bertie explains that his used to be left handed but that was corrected. As were his knobby knees. It is a moment that could have been heavy handed and pushed way over the top but is instead insightful and tragic. The scene reveals the hardships that come with royalty, but not in a way meant to inspire pity. Instead it is constructed to show that there is an unseen depth to the life of royalty: for great rewards one must pay great prices.

The movie is wonderfully shot. There is a very interesting visual motif used in which extremely wide angle lenses are used to capture the entirety of the architecture as well as the characters inside it. For instance, Geoffrey Rush’s face and the entire ceiling and walls of Westminster Abbey. This technique creates very imposing figures that Bertie is always set against, helping bring the audience into the mind of Bertie. These imposing figures that are as large as the buildings they occupy are how Bertie sees things when he is under duress. Aside from this motif, the film has a beautiful elegance in its cinematography. Shots are wide and take their time, allowing the viewer to take in the beauty of the world being captured.

Really, the entire film is wonderful. The editing is tight, the film never feels like it lags. Alexandre Desplat’s score is elegant and regal, yet still intimate. Tom Hooper as director managed to balance humor and drama to craft a film that is witty and insightful. The King's Speech is a film that shows us that we are all human, no matter our standing in society, we are all fragile, we all have demons to overcome, and we can all find the courage to overcome them.