Royal Treatment

The Oscar nominations were released today, and I'm ahead of the game this year -- I've already seen three of the five Best Picture nominees. Two of them, I've already talked about: The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine. The third, I just caught this past Sunday: The Queen.

I find it very difficult to review this movie. On the one hand, it fails my main personal criteria for high enthusiasm: it fails to generate much of any emotion in me. On the other, it is a very well-crafted film on just about every level you can look at it.

The story is well-structed, with a tight unity of theme, centering around the royal family's bizarre behavior in the aftermath of Lady Diana's death. The realism in every aspect of the film is laudible. The performances don't feel like "performances," and the action and photography doesn't feel "staged," but rather captured by some invisible camera that might really have been there. Not that it has the rough edges of a documentary, but it certainly has a similar realism.

The feeling of class and manners is conveyed to perfection. You're transported into a place where nothing makes sense the way it would in the "real world," yet you can imagine how it makes sense to these characters.

Helen Mirren is probably deserving of her recent Golden Globe win (and her likely forthcoming Oscar win). She doesn't deliver histrionics or hysterics, but is so utterly convincing that it's hard to find a single moment in the film where it feels like she's acting.

And yet, the lack of emotion is where the film falls short for me. I find I'm not even left with a sense of sympathy or empathy after the tale is told. At most, I get a sort of distant intellectual shaking of my head in marveling how far Tony Blair fell after the events depicted in the film.

Now, repression of emotion is one of the central themes of the movie. And it's a reasonable statement that an Oscar-worthy movie is one that conveys its theme this thoroughly and utterly. But that's not the full sum of the equation for me personally. In the end, I give the film a B.