3x10 Cri de Coeur

[8.0/10] I wouldn’t deign to compare The Crown to Frozen. But there’s a similar move at play in both, one that I found sweet when the Disney film did it, and one that moved me when the prestige drama did. Beyond the romantic trials and travails of the reserved princess and the more extroverted princess, beyond the loves decent and dangerous, there is a sisterly bond that abides, one that provides each a rock in the storm that they’d be lost without.

I take that to be the point of “Cri de Coeur”. Much of the episode focuses on the degradation of Margaret and Tony’s marriage. We see signs of bitter recriminations. We see Tony off with “The Thing”, his young mistress whom he publicly betrays his wife with. We see Margaret find a dopey little himbo of her own, an aspiring gardener named Roddy. And we see both members of the marriage get what they thought they wanted, only to be devastated by the results.

Candidly, for much of it, I wasn’t quite sure what the point was. It’s no great surprise that the Armstrong-Joneses marriage is not a strong or an easy one. The fact that Tony sleeps around has been established right from the jump. Margaret taking her turn at infidelity is no great shock either.

And yet, the whimsy of it all is self-justifying. I don’t know that I ever would have asked for “Helena Bonham Carter in: Princess Margaret’s Carribean Adventure”, but by god, it’s fun as hell to see Margaret in her element. The music is kickin’. The scenery is divine. And as always, Margaret’s witty bon mots and self-centered air about her are engrossing and stealthily charming. Her escapades in an ocean paradise are wickedly entertaining, even before the point of them emerges.

That’s impressive, because let’s be honest, Margaret kind of sucks here. She picks out Roddy like she’s selecting a piece of fruit. She treats him as much like a pet as she does a person. The power dynamics are off tremendously, an issue intensified by the age difference. The guy frankly seems too light on brain cells to really care. He appears to be a willing boytoy. But the way she treats him is, at best, uncomfortable.

Yet, there’s something fascinating about how “Cri de Coeur” flips the gender dynamics of that trope, which if nothing else makes the whole thing novel. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the reverse deployed unironically, with an older man and a younger woman in a way that’s supposed to be charming and inadvertently comes off predatory. So seeing the shoe on the other foot, with a woman chasing the pleasures of her youth as our perspective character, and the camera lingering to the point of leering at her male suitor’s body, has a power that comes from the rarity.

There is, however, a bitter pill at the bottom of the bottle. As her friend’s husband points out, Roddy is just the new model of Tony. Even when she’s dancing in her island hideaway, she looks across the way and imagines her husband judging her for the dalliance. As toxic as their relationship seems, as toxic as it’s seemed from the beginning, they get something out of it. I can’t articulate it exactly, and I certainly wouldn’t want it, but however painful holding onto it may be, they’re loath to give it up.

Their games, their insults, their “differences in views” are a means to tear one another down, but also the core of the electricity in their relationship, a prelude to sexual catharsis and something they both feed on, however unhealthy it may be. I wouldn’t call it love, exactly. Maybe something more like addiction. But despite the casual cruelty toward one another, that’s the most surprising thing when Margaret’s photo once again makes the papers -- there’s an undeniable attachment between them that neither can quite bear to see severed. It deepens this relationship, from a coupling of untamed idiots to a pair of broken mixed up people who, however cavalier, have the self-awareness to feel this loss.

So when Tony is mournful rather than jubilant at his wife’s public infidelity, when lashes out at Margaret for bringing her boytoy into their home, you can see that it comes from a place of hurt. And then Margaret seeks the ultimate act of trying to avoid pain, broken off from the love she once felt and bereft of her faltering replacement for it. It is softly heartbreaking, the person who projects that “shine” her mother speaks about, of wit and whimsy, succumbing to a well of hurt that we’ve seen for decades now. One wonders what her life might have been like if the clouds had parted and Mr. Townsend had been permitted to marry her, to provide that balance that Elizabeth wants for her own son, and helped save her from the worst of it.

To balance out the sorrowful poison of that, “Cri de Coeur” gives us a bit of treacle to help the medicine go down. We do not get much of Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Wilson here, but what we get is heartwarming enough for the brevity not to matter. The unlikely rapport between the two of them is sweet as all get out: the stiff royal who found and unlikely companion in the opposition PM she once feared as a Russian spy. The propulsion of her to someone who let out an “unconstitutional cheer” when Mr. Wilson won reelection, and he the erstwhile radical who sounds like a ruddy monarchist, is winning as all hell. The gesture of friendship, of the Queen dining with him at Downing Street as she once did with “Dear Winston” is the icing on the cake.

That icing is necessary, because then The Crown decides to rip and tug at your heartstrings with all its might. The scene between Elizabeth and her sister after Margret’s suicide attempt works like gangbusters. As we’ve seen, Elizabeth is not given over to great shows of emotion. So to hear her call Margaret the most important person in her life, to see her kiss her sister’s hand in relief, to tell her that life without her would be “unbearable” -- well, it got me misty.

We get a stately, well-produced montage at the end about the inexorable importance of The Crown as a symbol. Margaret gives a writerly monologue about not showing any cracks, because the steadiness of that symbol helps paper over things when the country is falling apart. And I appreciate it as a resolution of the jealousy between them, with Margaret firmly recognizing her sister as the right person for the role. But it’s all the sort of stuff we’ve heard time and again in this series.

But what moved me is not the vindication of The Crown, but the repair of the relationship between two sisters who’ve had more than their share of tumult between them. Elizabeth threw more than one wrench into her sister’s romantic plans. Margaret’s public “shining” often made Elizabeth insecure in her royal position and in her marriage. They’ve cast barbs great and small in one another’s direction for some time. You could be forgiven for thinking that, but for the tether of royal expectations, they’d be glad to be rid of one another.

And yet, when that opportunity presents itself, albeit in ghastly terms, what follows instead is a desperate plea for each to “carry on” and an affirmation that, whatever their struggles, together and apart, each’s world is a better place for having the other in it.

There are more than enough royals in the world. There are more than enough tales of woe from bad relationships and bad marriages. There aren’t enough stories about sisters finding that what they have is more important than all of the other ruckus our culture tends to fixate on instead. I’m glad to see Elizabeth and Margaret together, and in its final word of the season, to see The Crown giving us one more.