The Queen 2006

[5.8/10] The term “Oscar Bait” has taken on water in recent years. It was always a broad term to begin with, but increasingly it covers everything from polished productions that chart the lives of historical figures to arty fly-on-the-wall films about hardscrabble oppression. But when I think of the term, I think of movies like The Queen: manicured movies, touching on figures and events of public note, with each bit of symbolism and theme and possible point to make laid bare for the audience on a veritable silver platter.

In brief, this movie is as loud and blunt as a bulky Land Rover clambering over a rocky pathway. Queen Elizabeth is an old fashioned institutionalist, slow-to-change and dedicated to the time-tested ways. Tony Blair is a new-fangled modernizer, more in touch with the people and apt to chart new ground in his role as British Prime Minister. The death of Princess Diana represents a flashpoint for both of them, requiring the titular monarch to navigate the novel demands of her modern public and her civilian counterpart to navigate the creaky protocols of the English monarchy.

The Queen wears this clash on its sleeve. The monarchs are cold and aloof and set in their ways. The new administration at Downing Street is friendly and young and casual in a fashion that reflects current sensibilities. The royals believe propriety requires mourning in private with dignity and reserve, while Blair’s crew understands the need to satisfy a hungry public. One set believes the hoopla (and eventual rancor) over Diana’s passing will just blow over, and that the Monarchy’s place is to stand above it, while the other understands it as an event that requires a response with the English desiring something that shows their leaders are of the people.

These are not bad themes to grapple with. Whether or not they’re true to life or, as Tinseltown often does, flattens out the bumps and rough edges of history, is beside the point. Using the dichotomy between the royal set and the elected leaders to signify changing sensibilities in the country isn’t a bad beat. The Queen just beats the audience over the head with the idea.

There’s zero subtlety to this movie (save for Helen Mirren’s performance). At one point Prince Charles practically announces to the audience, “Maybe to some people, it’s just a flag” when referring to the royal standard and the controversy over the bare pole at Buckingham palace, all but underlining the point the movie aims to make in the scene. The film is littered with thudding dialogue like that, devoid of any touch of reality and instead feeling like a tenth grade essay contest with world leaders as mouthpieces. Rest assured, you will not walk away from this film unsure of what anyone is thinking or feeling in a given moment, let alone what the import of a given line or moment is, because this movie writes it all on the screen.

The only saving grace, if you’ll pardon the expression, is Mirren’s acting. Make no mistake, she’s as ill-served by the movie’s on-the-nose dialogue as anybody. She and Michael Sheen as Blair each have those blaring Oscar reel moments that allow actors to go big to sway Academy voters with the most acting rather than the best acting. As the two poles of the film, both give their speeches that make the film’s message so big you could see it from space.

But Mirren has the advantage of playing a character who’s supposed to be outwardly stoic but inwardly possessed of deep feeling. Here too, The Queen fumbles the ball in overdone scenes, with Elizabeth projecting her pain over Diana, her grandchildren, and perhaps even herself onto a stag who appears in a private moment, to counterbalance the calm demeanor she’s expected (or expects herself) to otherwise exude at all times. Yet in other moments, Mirren finds the space between the Queen’s tradition-mandated stiff upper lip and her true feelings that show how even a substandard script can’t hold a seasoned pro down.

The Queen is also indifferently shot. There’s a few showy moments of scenic beauty when depicting the Scottish countryside. But for the most part, the film’s shooting team aims for more of a flat, cinema verite feel. It’s an odd choice for such a bombastic movie, with an aesthetic that aims to bring these larger than life figures down to earth with writing that makes them feel more like dialogue-delivery mechanisms than real people. The production work at least serves the film’s heavily-underlined themes, with the pristine opulence of the Queen’s surroundings contrasting with the comparatively disheveled, West Wing-like confines of the Prime Minister’s offices, signifying the different styles and approaches each cohort takes.

The turn of the film comes when the issue of how to respond to the public outcry over Diana’s death and the royalty’s lack of response froths to a boil. In the end, it is the staid, old-fashioned ruler who bends to public pressure and breaks protocol to be with the people and recognize their grief. And it is the young pip, elected due to his reforming zeal, who works behind the scenes to try to protect and even save the monarchy. The stakes feel overstated and over-inflated in all of this, and these nominally surprising shifts feel so preordained as to seem basic. But there is, at a minimum, some good structure to those character arcs, however much they are in service to a movie so obvious and trite.

In the film’s final scenes, it stumbles ass-backward into a more searing and insightful point -- that public admiration is a fickle thing, such that today’s darlings are tomorrow’s pariahs. The Queen half acknowledges the mercenary elements in all of this, a need to recognize and pay homage to how the public sees its public figures, regardless of whether that bears and relation to the flesh and blood people who fill those roles.

That fickleness isn’t limited to popular views on leaders or celebrities, but also on what constitutes the best in film and television. Even just in the last decade and a half, Oscar voters have gradually trended away (albeit not completely so) from stuffy, speech-y fare like this in favor of grittier, more lived-in pieces. Amid that shift, The Queen, like its namesake, threatens to seem more like a relic of a bygone era than something relevant to modern styles and tastes. But alas, a film, unlike a person, cannot bend to meet modern times.