Film Reviews	Royal Perogative by M. Faust

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Trailer for "The Queen"

Early in The Queen, Steven Frears’ new film about a troublesome period in the recent life of England’s monarch, Elizabeth II is preparing for an official meeting with the newly elected Tony Blair, who won’t technically become England’s prime minister until she invites him. Wondering about his potential as an anti-monarchist, she recalls a previous meeting where she found his wife Cherie’s curtsey to be “shallow.”

When the Blairs are ushered in a few minutes later, Cherie’s curtsey is indeed notably subpar. It reminded me of the genuflections you can see in church from people who attend mass out of habit instead of conviction, the ones whose knees rarely get as far as a 20 degree angle before entering their pews.

It seems to me that the monarchy is a lot like Catholicism. They’re both nonsensical, filled with pomp and pageantry that have little if anything to do with our lives. But that’s a rational perspective, and these are institutions that aren’t interested in our rational minds. They appeal to a universal desire to be a part of something larger, grander and more timeless than ourselves. To attempt to streamline them and make them “relevant” is to miss the point entirely. You can embrace them or shun them, but there isn’t much room in between.

Most of the action of The Queen takes place in a single week, that following the death of Princess Diana. Never a palace favorite in the first place, her standing in the royal family didn’t bottom out with her divorce from Prince Charles the previous year. She continued to maintain a high public profile, winning favor with the British people for reasons that have never been quite clear to me. Her death in a car with her lover Dodi Fayed, while being chased by paparazzi in Paris, was the last straw in more ways than one.

The royal family’s official reaction is, as always, not to react. Even more than most of her ilk, Elizabeth was raised to be stoical in the face of disaster. “This is a family funeral, not a fairground attraction,” she says in denying the possibility of a public funeral from her retreat in Balmoral.

Blair, on the other hand, sees a disaster of a different sort approaching. There’s nothing like death to fuel a cult, and the tabloid-stoked emotions of the British people reach a fever pitch as the Queen refuses to pay proper tribute to “the people’s princess.” In office for only four months and yet to make his mark despite high expectations, Blair takes it on himself to persuade the Queen that the public demands a display of emotion.

Enthralled as it is by the make-up-caked visage of the dead princess, The Queen occasionally threatens to turn into a TV movie tribute to a dead celebrity. Fortunately, it always gets back to what it really wants to do, the delicate task of exposing and dissecting public figures without killing them.

You don’t have to see the movie to know what attitude it is going to take toward Elizabeth, simply from the casting of Helen Mirren in the part. Probably the most lauded living actress in England (a status that peaked with the final episodes of her television series Prime Suspect, to be broadcast on PBS later this month), she is the sine qua non of the film: I can’t think of another actress who could even have approached this role, much less made it work.

She’s aided in what would seem to be an impossible task—portraying a figure who is famous yet largely unknown, at least in the faux intimate way we expect of American politicians—by the script’s self-limitations. Just as it confines its timeline to a single event, so does it keep its portrait of Elizabeth to a few salient but compelling points. She is an autumnal figure, raised to carry on a tradition of permanence that for the first time in her long life seems to be showing cracks.

The Queen has an air of authenticity despite the fact that much of what it depicts can only be surmise: A final conversation between Blair and Elizabeth, for instance, can hardly have been reported in any detail by either. (Scripter Peter Morgan claims to have numerous private sources whom he is sworn not to reveal). And in the end it hardly matters. If anything here is incorrect, neither Blair nor the royal family is likely to say anything (well, maybe Prince Philip, especially if he’s really anything like the curmudgeon played here by James Cromwell). If we have to accept it as a myth, it’s a myth of power as we would like to believe it is exercised