Since 1929 — the year of the very first Academy Award ceremony — only one woman has ever won the Academy Award for Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow The Hurt Locker). As of 2018, only five women have ever been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director:

Lady Bird helmer Greta Gerwig became that fifth nominee this year. She joined Lina Wertmüller (Seven Beauties), Jane Campion (The Piano), Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) and barrier buster Kathryn Bigelow in the exclusive club.

Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins didn’t make the cut even though she was widely regarded in the press as a contender. The film was a commercial and critical hit. It grossed $821 million worldwide and was predicted as a serious contender for a Best Picture nomination, having received one of 11 nominations for the Producers Guild of America’s Darryl F. Zanuck Award. No dice.  That the film was listed as one of the American Film Institute’s Top Ten Films of 2017 didn’t make a difference.

Perhaps there’s only room at the table for one woman at a time.  So here’s a modest proposal– Let’s split the award in two.
One award for Best Female Director and one award for Best Male Director.  That would level the playing field. Arguments about “diluting the award” are irrelevant and really only apply to men (since women have been by-and-large excluded).  Its Awards are divided in sports and in the Actor categories. If the difference is between women being excluded or recognized for their ability among their peers, I say split the category.

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Kathryn Bigelow has a new film, Detroit, being released now.  The biggest criticism of the film so far is the lack of a strong central protagonist. Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the film yet myself but will write about it soon.

In her previous film, The Hurt Locker, Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) is a memorable Power of Idealism protagonist.  He has a cocky, shoot-from-the-hip, iconoclastic style in defusing roadside explosives.  These deadly bombs are hidden in the sand, in cars, and in the occasional corpse.  He has techniques that are all his own as he travels through the gutted terrain of Iraq ravaged by war, poor planning policies, and the smash-and-burn fury of local insurgents.

Characters driven by the Power of Idealism want to stand out from the crowd, to be extraordinary, unique and special.  They are rebels, iconoclasts, mavericks, and artists of all kinds.

Power of Idealism characters are intense, passionate and rebellious. Everyone in the story immediately recognizes and acknowledges that their role is somehow heroic or “larger than than life.”  They don’t play by anyone else’s rules.

Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) in The Hurt Locker is a quintessential Power of Idealism character.  He is intense, cavalier and is moving swiftly toward becoming a legend.  In this exchange, his reputation grows:

Colonel Reed: You the guy in the flaming car, Sergeant James?

Staff Sergeant William James: Afternoon, sir. Uh, yes, sir.

Colonel Reed: Well, that’s just hot shit. You’re a wild man, you know that?

Staff Sergeant William James: Uh, yes, sir.

Colonel Reed: He’s a wild man. You know that? I want to shake your hand.

Staff Sergeant William James: Thank you, sir.

Colonel Reed: Yeah. How many bombs have you disarmed?

Staff Sergeant William James: Uh, I’m not quite sure.

Colonel Reed: Segeant?

Staff Sergeant William James: Yes, sir.

Colonel Reed: I asked you a question.

Staff Sergeant William James: Eight hundred seventy-three, sir.

Colonel Reed: Eight hundred! And seventy-three. Eight hundred! And seventy-three. That’s just hot shit. Eight hundred and seventy-three.

Staff Sergeant William James: Counting today, sir, yes.

Colonel Reed: That’s gotta be a record. What’s the best way to… go about disarming one of these things?

Staff Sergeant William James: The way you don’t die, sir.

Colonel Reed: That’s a good one. That’s spoken like a wild man. That’s good.

A. O. Scott, writing for the New York Times describes James like this:  “Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) is something else, someone we recognize instantly even if we have never seen anyone quite like him before. He is a connoisseur, a genius, an artist.”

The artistic temperament— and the yearning to be “something more extraordinary” creates a white hot intensity of feeling in these characters.  In contrast, long-term relationships and the comfortable companionship that committed loving couples (and families) share seem suffocatingly pedestrian.

Power of Idealism characters, operating in their Dark Side, are unprepared to make the ordinary, small, everyday sacrifices real long-term every-day love requires, especially when there are children involved.

In this exchange James explains to his infant son:

Staff Sergeant William James: You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don’t ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older… some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you’ll realize it’s just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And then you forget the few things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.

Staff Sgt. William James wants to live fast, die young, and leave a legend behind. He simply cannot find the extraordinary in ordinary family life. He must follow the adrenaline rush, upping the level of risk, and taking ever more dangerous chances.

For more information on how to create a powerful, dynamic Power of Idealism character, click HERE.

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How much bad am I willing to do in the cause of good?

In Lincoln, written by Tony Kushner and directed by Steven Spielberg, President Lincoln so firmly believes in the necessity of Emancipation that he is willing to authorize all manner of arm-twising, dirty deals, and political bribery to get the bill passed.  At the time, Thaddeus Stevens, played in the movie by Tommy Lee Jones, said, “”The greatest measure in the nineteenth century was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.”

In Zero Dark Thirty, written by Mark Boal and directed by Katherine Bigelow, a young CIA operative called Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, is obsessed with finding and killing Osama Bin Ladin. She is involved in morally reprehensible torture in order to help track down her quarry.  She is driven and relentless, so much so that when she is successful she has no idea what to do next.

Bigelow explains in an interview, “I think what’s so interesting and so poignant for Jessica, myself, for all of us, is this idea that this woman (Maya) has spent the last ten years exclusively in the pursuit of one man and yes, at the end of the day, she triumphed, but it’s not a victory because finally, at the end of the day, you’re left with much larger questions like, where does she go from here? Where do we go from here? Now what?” Chastain adds, “I find that to end the film on that question is far more interesting than providing an answer.”

Can I find the flexibility, the forgiveness, or the mercy to make reasonable compromises?

In Lincoln, the person that has a real protagonist’s journey is Tommy Lee Jones in the role of Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens spent his political life advocating for total Negro emancipation, including the right to vote and own property. He was adamant and uncompromising. In the final, down-to-the-wire vote-taking, Stevens must turn his back on everything he has always stood for in order to assure that Lincoln’s lesser bill passes. Steven’s struggles mightily with his conscience but finally allows practicality to win.

At the time Stevens said: “Believing then, that this is the best proposition that can be made effectual, I accept it. I shall not be driven by clamor or denunciation to throw away a great good because it is not perfect. I will take all I can get in the cause of humanity and leave it to be perfected by better men in better times.”

Steven’s leap of faith was being flexible enough to allow an imperfect bill to pass because that served the greater good.

In the film, Les Miserables, written by William Nicholson and directed by Tom Hopper, prison guard Javert, played by Russell Crowe, cannot compromise his strict moral standards.  He finds it impossible to have mercy and not enforce the strict letter of the law.  What is legal is not always just.  And what is just is not always legal.  This is a great dilemma for Power of Conscience characters.  Javert is in such conflict that he would rather kill himself rather than compromise his precise and rigid sense of duty in favor of what is just and merciful.

In the animated film, Brave, written by Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, Brenda Chapman, and Irene Mecchi, and directed by Andrews and Chapman and co-directed by Purcell, Queen Elinor is a Power of Conscience character. She is a strict and demanding taskmaster, a perfectionist, and is driven by a strong sense of tradition and royal responsibility. Over the course of the story she finds the flexibility to recognize her daughter’s uniqueness and she learns to fully appreciate Merida for who she is.

What is the higher duty?

Power of Conscience character universally wrestle with the question of what their inherent morality and sense of duty asks of them.  These  characters fear not living up to their own internal standards or sense of propriety and decency.  They are afraid of being or becoming unworthy and must continually prove their own “goodness”  or “righteousness”. These characters don’t fear failure in the eyes of the world; they fear not living up to their own (often impossibly high) moral or ethical standards.

As I said before: What is just is not always legal or proper. And what is legal or proper is not always just.  What is more important?  Is the spirit of the law or the letter of the law more important?  When is it right to be pragmatic and flexible rather than unbending and unyielding in your standards? When is being flexible and pragmatic being lax and immoral? Power of Conscience characters provide a fascinating glimpse into one set of humanity’s great dilemmas.

David Denby writing in The New Yorker puts his finger on another problem:

The boy’s voice, as (author Jonathan Safran) Foer creates it, is a babbling brook of hopes and questions and bits of information on every imaginable subject. In the novel, we can enjoy all of this heroic spieling and exploring as a form of antic play. It never occurs to us that an actual little boy, however bright, however maddened by grief, could talk this way. Oskar’s voice is a writer’s virtuoso construction, and Foer combines it with the voice of Oskar’s grandfather, photographs of falling bodies, odd dialogues, lists of numbers, garbled paragraphs, nearly blank pages, and many other typographical adventures. The novel is a kind of postmodernist collage stained with tear… Much of what Oskar says in the book is amusingly beside the point. Onscreen, however, the sound of a hyper-articulate boy talking semi-nonsense becomes very hard to take.

I agree.  The “voices” in the book did not translate well into film, which is way too literal to capture the author’s delicacy, humor, and fantastical imagination.

Despite the large, and talented, cast that Payne has assembled, The Descendants revolves entirely around its supremely amiable star. But, even with the crutch provided by an insistent voiceover, Clooney’s part is underwritten. Moreover, the actor’s own blessings are so evident that it’s hard to accept him as the beleaguered (if fabulously wealthy) everyman that the movie demands he be. With supporting characters called upon to react toward him or develop around him as necessary in a given situation, the narrative feels less like an unfolding novel than like an inflated short story. Slowly rolling downhill, The Descendants takes a turn or two but is basically always en route toward the reconciliation that’s a foregone conclusion.

The film offers little surprise and less character development.  We are told that Matt King (George Clooney) is a workaholic but there is absolutely NO evidence that’s true.  Even in the midst of a family crisis, like a spouse being serious injured and in a coma, a workaholic’s cell phone would keep ringing, his blackberry would keep updating, and his emails would continue to pour in.  King’s electronic devices are strangely silent.  Did the secretary at his busy law practice forget his phone number?  Did all his appointments get mysteriously cancelled? Did his clients suddenly have no crises of their own which need his attention?  We never see King wrestle with the urgency of two competing emergencies or have to battle where to put his attention– on the personal or professional.  He is totally focused on his immediate family situation with absolutely no outside interference.  This begs credibility for anyone who has ever been torn between a personal emergency and a demanding job.

King’s daughters allegedly don’t really know their dad (“I’m the back-up parent”).  Yet he immediately gathers his daughters to his side.  Wouldn’t it be easier to just leave them in boarding school, hire a nanny, or throw money or other resources at his kids if he were truly as disengaged as he is alleged to be?  He even puts up with a goofy social inept boyfriend as a travel companion to make the trip easier on his daughter.  There is some initial teen and tween snottiness over the course of the family road trip but King very quickly forms a warm and loving bond with his daughters.  Sure there is squabbling, bickering, and mocking but that is the nature of kids. It seems there is much more animosity and bitterness directed toward their comatose mom.  His older daughter is furious at her mother for cheating on King with a glad-handing over-eager real estate broker.  Immediately taking her father’s side in no way indicates she thinks her father is a jerk, a bad guy, or a lousy father.  This is the story of a preoccupied but relatively good dad who becomes a somewhat better dad.  Not a very dramatic character arc.

If a woman is going to cheat on the wealthy, charming, handsome King (he’s GEORGE CLOONEY) with a slightly dweeby somewhat desperate real estate broker  I want to know why.  Is she choosing a lesser man to embarrass or humiliate her husband, does her new lover put her husband to shame in some important respect, or is there some manipulative plot afoot having to do with the family land deal?  The affair is a mystery and just isn’t credible.  Her father does accuse King of being too cheap to buy his daughter her own boat but, again, we never see any evidence or action that indicates he is stingy in any of his dealings.  He doesn’t complain about the cost of bring the obnoxious boyfriend along.  He doesn’t scrimp on meals or anything having to do with the road trip.  The script tells us lots of things about various characters but never show us these characteristics in action.  Again, not the essence of compelling drama.

Then there is the land deal itself.  The King family came into their inheritance because of an interracial marriage between a great-great-grandfather and a Hawaiian princess.  This union had to be scandalous in its day.  Yet now, when interracial marriage is common in Hawaii and elsewhere, there isn’t a single Polynesian family member to be found.  What is with that?  If this is a film about family and if disposing of the family property gets so much screen time– why aren’t family cultural issues and differences at the heart of the dispute.  Any one who has a mixed family of any kind knows these kind of cultural differences surface under stress particularly when vast sums of money is involved.  Yet, even though King, has the deciding vote, his family is unusually passive and mellow when it comes down to the actual decision.  Little drama here and even less credibility.

Much has been made of the Hawaiian setting and the film’s sense of place.  Yet, given the white-bread nature of the family and lack of cultural specificity, I think the film could just as easily be set in Minnesota and the dispute be over acres of pristine lake front property.  Other than the lush landscape shots there is nothing in the story that makes it particularly Hawaiian.

I’ll close with a summation from Dana Stevens writing for Slate:

This is the setup for exactly the kind of story Payne does best: road movies about less-than-heroic oddballs on quests that are at once transformative and essentially ridiculous. I was so excited to see what he’d do with this misfit crew once he rounded them up and sent them on their journey. But The Descendants squanders the comic energy of its opening act. Once the Kings get to Kauai, Payne seems content to sit back and watch as the family pads around the spectacular shoreline, alternately squabbling and bonding. Matt eventually has a brief, awkward encounter with the man who made him a cuckold, and also a meeting with his barfly cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges), who has his own plans for that chunk of family property. Amid all this desultory beachcombing, Matt learns hard lessons about his wife, his daughters, and himself—but they’re lessons any discerning viewer already saw coming a mile away.

I found the film predictable, lacking in character development, with a script that continually tells us rather than shows us.  This is not a recipe for a Best Adapted Screenplay award.  Best Director perhaps, there some really engaging and tender moments in the performances, or Best Cinematography perhaps, the views are gorgeous– but in no way is this underwritten screenplay a Best in the writing category.

The Artist

Alfred Hitchcock felt that the silent era ended too soon.  He believed that movies would have been richer overall if images were allowed to “speak” a little longer without the distraction of sound– that there was much more to learn about creating a visual vocabulary from the silent era before sound usurped this method of filmmaking.

Hitchcock never did completely trust sound in his own work and believed the audience should be able to follow the story if somehow the sound went out.  I wonder how many filmmaker today could make a film “speak” mostly through image and action. Clearly, writer-director Michael Hazanavicius is one of the rare filmmaker-artists whose pictures are worth a thousand words.

Hazanavicius’ film, The Artist, is about George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) a silent movie star, part swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks and part romantic swoon-master Rudolph Valentino.  He is at the top of his game– the undisputed King of Hollywood.

George is a Power of Idealism character, clearly extraordinary in every way. We meet him at the end of his era, although he doesn’t know that or accept it until the end of the film.  Just as George is about to become an anachronism he accidentally meets Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) at a big premiere.  He catches her as she stumbles/is pushed out of the crowd and into his arms.  A photographer captures the moment on film and the embrace makes the tabloids.  On the strength of that image, she manages to get a job as an extra in George’s next film.

Ty Burr writing in The Boston Globe describes what happens next:

There’s a wonderful sequence early on in which Valentin and Peppy film four takes of a scene where they have to waltz across a crowded dance floor, the movie star and the extra falling harder for each other with each cut. Without color and sound, their emotions are so close you can almost take them in your hands, and that’s what sometimes seems to have gone missing from movies – the intimacy of two people filmed without artifice.

Later there is another lovely scene in which Peppy drapes herself in George’s tuxedo coat, hanging on a coat rack, in such a way that it looks like he holds her in an intimate embrace.  It is a jewel of a scene twinkling with graceful physical comedy and bright with love and longing.

George, unfortunately, is on the way down just as Peppy is on the way up.  His studio, Kinograph, run by Al Zimmer (John Goodman) is scrapping George’s next silent film in favor of a slate filled only with talking pictures.  George doesn’t believe sound is here to stay and finances his next adventure film himself.  Of course it’s a flop.  The public has moved on and so has Peppy.  She opens the same day in her first big blockbuster.

George spirals downward.  He loses everything except Peppy’s continuing love and admiration.  Bill Goodykoontz writing in The Arizona Republic sums up the film’s appeal perfectly:

There are nods to more silent movies and stars than you’ll care to tally. That’s fun, as far as it goes, but what’s important is that Hazanvicius and Dujardin create characters and situations that feel original — situations that, despite the broadly played bits familiar to silent-film fans, have the same heart found in the movies of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. (LH: The movie displays exactly the kind of heart, gentleness, and generosity of spirit sadly lacking in most movies today.)

Credit Dujardin (playing George) for a lot of that. His grace and carriage allow him to float through the dance scenes, he’s funny in the comic bits, yet he brings enough weight to the down-and-out segments to break your heart. Bejo (playing Peppy), too, is outstanding as the star who never forgets where she came from — or who inspired her.

Peppy is desperate to help George and finally hits on something he can do without speaking– dance. He takes a leap of faith and accepts a smaller more ordinary role in her film. The two dance off into the sunset.

One of the most amazing aspects of the film is how well it captures the tone, style and even movement of the times.  The actor’s facial expressions and physicalization is absolutely authentic to the era.  (Watch any film from the 20’s or 30 to see for your self.) Boardwalk Empire, set in the same era, as good as it is in many respects, is clearly modern actors playing a period piece. The actors in The Artist fully and completely inhabit the era with every ounce of their being.  That is a stunning achievement. America was a different place in the silent era and we are transported back with ease, grace, style, charm, and heart.

The Artist truly is the Best Picture of 2012.

The plot of Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s much-anticipated foray into 3D filmmaking, hinges on a clockwork mannequin. He’s an outstanding piece of craftsmanship, carefully fashioned from antique components, terrifyingly expensive-looking and beautiful to behold. But the mechanisms whirring away inside him are plainly visible – for all the technical wizardry required to piece him together, he’s still very obviously not alive. He’s a perfect metaphor for the entire film. Robbie Collin, The Daily Telegraph, UK

Last night, my random choice was Dogtooth, mostly because I could stream it instantly on NetFlix, but also because I had heard good things about it as an overlooked Oscar nomination (mostly from my alt film friends).

WARNING: this film is not for everyone.  It is strange, perverse and quite disturbing– but fascinating after some slow-going.  My opinion reflects the common consensus and the film has a 93% fresh critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the “strange perverse” caveat.

The film enters, without explanation or set up, into the insular world of a reasonablely wealthy family in Greece.  Three adult children (without names) live with their parents, completely isolated from the outside world.

The first scene opens on  a vocabulary lesson, via cassette recorder, providing the definitions of a number of words whose meanings are arbitrarily switched– the word “sea” the adult children are taught means “armchair.” When asking to pass the “salt” the word they are taught to use is “phone.”

They are also taught the outside world is extremely dangerous and even fatal.  (A non-existant fictional “older brother” they are told ventured outside and was devoured by a housecat– one of the most dangerous and ferocious animals on the planet who feeds on human flesh).  The father returns with ripped clothes and smeared head to toe with blood to report the grim news.

The family compound (house, pool, large garden) is located inside a tall hedged fence that completely obstructs the view.  Only the father ventures outside, in the safety of his car.  He owns a large factory and is a dead-pan but accomplished and probably expert business man.  He’s made up a variety of stories about why no one ever sees his family and why no one is ever invited to the house.  (He is a Power of Reason character and alienation vs connection is a common thread through-out the movie.)

The mother is an obsessive Power of Love character.  She willingly goes along with the father to protect the children from outside “bad influences” and to keep them safe, secure, always in her orbit and completely dependent on her.

The family television only plays video cassettes made by the father which depict family scenes and family events.  When the father buys groceries all the product labels are carefully removed and discarded before any item is brought into the house.  The father “translates” an English language Dean Martin record, which the children are told was made by their “grandfather,” as an ode to family loyalty, fidelity and trying hard to please your parents.

The mother never leaves the compound but does have access to a rotary telephone, which is hidden and locked away in the parent’s bedroom.  The adult children believe she occasionally retreats to her room to talk to herself.  When one of the girls sneaks into the bedroom she has no idea how the phone works or what it is.  When she accidentally dials a number and hears a voice, the girl is terrified and immediately hides the phone again.

The adult children live a strange bizarre life and have no real context for anything.  They are at the edge of rebellion but when they question the parents the adult children accept the warped answers they receive.  The parents aren’t depicted as evil or horribly abusive (well maybe a couple of times).  They are strange, inappropriate and consumed with constructing a completely insular world of rather twisted innocence.  They enthusiastically celebrate all sorts of family events.  They laude their children’s achievement goals (all sorts of little contests are devised). They are mostly benevolent despots.

The only stranger the family sees is the female security guard who (while blindfolded) is occasionally driven to the compound to have joyless mechanical sex with the adult son.  When one of the daughters gets hold of her contraband videotapes of American films (Rocky, Jaws and perhaps Flashdance) the daughter begins to quote from the movies and acts out the dance sequence from Flashdance.  The isolation is shattered and things end as strangely as they began.

So where exactly did this lead me?  Lots of metaphors have been offered about the film– but as I thought about the film I wondered my own unquestioned assumptions, definitions and fears.   How much of what I believe did I inherit or do I accept without examination?  How many of my beliefs are warped or distorted by someone else’s experience that is presented as fact or “truth”?

It reminded me of the old story about the ham in the pan.  The story goes like this– A woman is cooking Easter dinner for her family and cuts off the ends of ham before tucking it into a very large pan and putting it into the oven.

Her small daughter asks her why she cuts the ham like that.  The mother answers that it is the way it’s always been done.  But then the mother wonders about this.  She asks her own mother about the reasons for cutting off the ends of the ham.

Her mother replies that it was how she was taught to prepare a ham.  They finally ask the family matriarch and she says that the oven in her home was too small to accommodate a large ham so she had to trim either end to make it fit in the pan and in the oven.

How long after the reason is obscured, has changed or become irrelevant do our assumptions and behavior patterns remain the same?  Sometimes what we are told is false, like in Dogtooth, and the warnings, information or attitudes passed on simply represent someone else’s fears, good intentions or experience, without any true contextual basis in reality or in our own experience.

For example, how many of my attitudes and assumptions toward money come from parents who were born just after the Great Depression?  I am revisiting a wonderful book, The Energy of Money, during this 40 days.  The book’s premise is– everything about who you are is intensified in your attitude about money.  Money is just a form of energy– how much energy you expend getting it, holding on to it or spending it.  Like all energy, it has a flow.  This flow can be blocked or squandered in response to fears, false assumptions or living in a way that is not intentional (not paying attention!)

How should my energy flow be focused in pursuing my projects?  How do I not squander or dissipate my energy by frantic activity.  How do I assess just what I want in evaluating and pursuing each project?  How do I do that intentionally and in reflection of who I want to be?

I am incredibly lucky and very blessed.  My father was extemely proud of me.  As a creative person I was never told that I should have a “back up plan” or I should study something “practical.”  He and my mother always believed I could do whatever I set out to do– no matter that I was a girl.  All good!

One of the last things my father said to me before he died was that he was only sorry he wouldn’t live to see my “great” success.  By that time I had been in a long-term mostly happy marriage (I still am), I helped raised one of my siblings (in my home) who was going through a rough patch in young adulthood, my husband and I owned a house, I had a law degree and a Masters Degree, I enjoyed a flourishing teaching, writing and consulting career and I had written several books– wasn’t that great success?

I know my dad meant that remark in a kindly way.  But maybe I have been chasing something that is always just beyond my reach and not defined by me.  I am not done by any means.  There are always further mountains to climb, bridges to build and to cross and obstacles to overcome– In this next 40 days I want to make sure those mountains, bridges and obstacles are mine– and not the unexamined reflections or desires of someone else.  I want to pursue only those projects that represent the best of what I can offer and which reflect the best of who I want to be.  I want to live more intentionally– at least during this 40 days of time.

How do you go about being intentional in your work?  Who defines you and your beliefs?  Do you ever wonder about that?  What fears or false assumptions might be standing in your way?  Comment here or on my ETB FaceBook page.

DAY ONE  POST- RANGO- IS HERE

The King’s Speech

The film tells the story of the unusual and very deep friendship between Prince Albert, the Duke of York (and later King George VI) played by Colin Firth and his Australian-born speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played by Geoffry Rush.

Prince Albert has a debilitating stammer which prevents him from speaking in public and makes any public interaction pure agony. All his life, he is able to retreat into the background and live in the shadow of his more polished, confident and gregarious elder brother Edward, Duke of Cornwall and Prince of Wales played by Guy Pearce.

When Albert and Edward’s father, King George V dies, Edward ascends to the throne. Only three months into his accession, and before he is crowned, Edward causes a constitutional crisis by proposing marriage to the American socialite Wallis Simpson.

Simpson was unacceptable because she divorced her first husband and was seeking a divorce from her second. She was still married when Edward proposed. Edward abdicates the throne in order to “marry the woman I love.”

With World War II looming in the background, The King’s Speech provides an interesting conflict of Character Types. We see the best and worst examples of the Power of Conscience and the Power of Idealism.

Albert is a Power of Conscience character. He rules by moral authority. Here he describes his power: If I am King, where is my power? Can I declare war? Form a government? Levy a tax? No! And yet I am the seat of all (moral) authority because they think that when I speak, I speak for them.

Like all Power of Conscience characters, Albert is driven by duty, responsibility and a powerful desire to do the right thing whatever the personal cost. In order to serve his subjects well he must sacrifice his dignity, be willing to act spontaneously and playfully in order to follow his therapist’s unconventional treatment.

Albert must absolutely humiliate himself while with Logue and perform seemly ridiculous exercises that have him barking swear words, making unseemly trills and other noises, jumping around and flapping about in complete abandon. In making the leap of faith to let go of his stiff reserve and sense of propriety, Albert overcomes his impediment and is able to speak to and for his people during Britain’s “darkest hour.”

Albert’s emotional journey in The King’s Speech is very similar to that of his daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, played by Helen Mirren in The Queen. (I’ve written about that film here) The monarchs in each film are reserved, formal and rather retiring, shy and stiff. Each has to sacrifice his/her dignity and sense of propriety in order to do what their subjects need. In both cases, this need boils down to a speech.

Albert, as King George VI, must tell his people they are at war with Germany and rally them emotionally for the difficulties and sacrifices that lie ahead. Queen Elizabeth must address her subjects’ emotional needs after Princess Diana’s tragic death. The Queen believes that mourning is a private affair. She refused to speak publicly, until Tony Blair as played by Michael Sheen, convinces her that her subjects’ emotional needs must take preference over her own dignity, reserve and sense of proper conduct.

A less attractive Power of Conscience character in The King’s Speech, is Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, played by Derek Jacobi. He is outraged by the King’s unconventional therapist.

The proper formal Archbishop does his best to discredit Lionel Logue, because Logue doesn’t have the proper credentials. The therapist is an undignified colonial with no accredited training. For a brief time Albert is tempted to abandon his treatment.

.

Lionel Logue is a Power of Idealism character. He is eccentric, flamboyant and passionate about what he does. He flies in the face of conformity and authority and has no use for the conventional wisdom of the time.

These characters want to find their special place in the world, be extraordinary in what they do, be called to some great destiny (which certainly was the case here) or make a lasting artistic impression. They are misfits, mavericks and rebels.

Lionel Logue: (as Albert lights a cigarette) Please don’t do that.

Albert: I’m sorry?

Lionel Logue: I believe sucking smoke into your lungs will kill you.

Albert: My physicians say it relaxes the throat.

Lionel Logue: They’re idiots.

Albert: They’ve all been knighted.

Lionel Logue: Makes it official then.

Logue also insists on complete equality with the royal Albert. Like all Power of Idealism characters Logue believes in personal freedom and autonomy and is unwilling to bow to anyone.

Albert’s brother Edward displays the narcissistic, dramatic and self-involved aspects of the Power of Idealism character. He is consumed with his passionate affair with Wallis Simpson. He wants to be free and refuses to bow to duty, his advisors or the government ministers. Instead, he makes the bold operatic romantic gesture and abdicates his throne in favor of “the woman I love.” He leaves the throne to Albert who, in the end, was just what Britain needed.

The King’s Speech is a wonderful film with brilliantly drawn Power of Conscience and Power of Idealism characters in constant tension and conflict. Read the full article on The Queen here.