Royal drama

Helen Mirren’s performance in the title role is reason enough, all by itself, to see this film. But, as it turns out, this sharply acted film has a good deal more going for it.

Going in, I had somewhat mixed feelings about the prospects of a film drama portraying Queen Elizabeth and the royal family—and Tony Blair—in the immediate aftermath of Princess Diana’s death in a car crash in 1997. But director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan have charted a surprisingly interesting course through those characters and events.

Mirren’s incarnation of the present-day Queen of England brings a curious sort of elegance to the woman’s fabled dowdiness. Yet the portrait remains an intriguingly ironic one, thanks especially to the parallel mini-dramas laid out in Morgan’s screenplay. In Morgan’s telling, the queen and newly elected Prime Minister Blair become a sort of political odd couple struggling to preserve a shred of respect for British royalty amid the blossoming of the “democratic,” media-fueled royalty embodied by the late Princess Di.

Michael Sheen’s deftly credible Blair—wide-eyed, earnest, and enigmatically astute—adds crucially to the ironic mix in Morgan’s scenario. And an excellent supporting cast brings added dimension to key secondary characters: a convolutedly futile Prince Charles (Alex Jennings), the snottily peevish Prince Phillip (James Cromwell) and the irreverent, perplexed Cherie Blair (Helen McCrory). Erstwhile starlet Sylvia Sims is all cosseted decay as the vitriolic Queen Mother.

While the Frears/Morgan/Mirren Elizabeth herself partakes of the shortcomings and emotional narrowness emitted by these royal caricatures, she is also larger than any of them—which is to say, in this case, not quite so small-minded. Morgan and Frears evoke this through the queen’s solitary outdoor ventures at the royal retreat in Scotland—brusquely shepherding her beloved pet dogs, and making an eerie pilgrimage to view the corpse of a 14-point stag that she had privately admired earlier out on the royal hunting preserve.

The stag, the dogs and Her Majesty’s Range Rover are also, in their way, significant characters in what amounts to a multi-faceted portrait—of the queen, yes, but also of contrasting Britains (e.g. Elizabeth vs. Blair) and kinds of royalty (Elizabeth vs. Diana). And Mirren is film/theater royalty offering a characterization that is bland, grand and caustic, all at once.