The King's Speech

No Oscar season is complete with a British period biopic, and this year's contender is The King's Speech. On paper, the plot doesn't sound like much - it is after all ultimately just an account of King George VI's struggles to overcome his stammer - but once you factor in the death of his father, his brother's affair with a divorced woman and subsequent abdication, and the impending war against Germany, you realise that framing the story round his speech impediment is quite an effective idea. By overcoming his stammer, George VI successfully banished his childhood insecurities and rose to the unwanted challenge of leading the country through a turbulent period.

The film certainly ticks all the Oscar-bait boxes - a fine cast turning in excellent performances (Colin Firth is superb in the lead role); a well-written script that hits all the right dramatic notes; strong attention to period detail. Crucially however, The King's Speech is in fact genuinely entertaining and surprisingly good fun. The back-and-forth banter between the king and his Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) never fails to bring a smile to your face and some of the more outrageous moments in their therapy sessions are laugh-out-loud funny. The best of these is a scene where the king unleashes an hilarious stream of profanity after realising that he never stammers while swearing - quite how the film got away with a 12A rating, I don't know...

So, clearly I liked the film. I would not, however, name it as one of the best films of the year and I certainly wouldn't give it a Best Picture Oscar. Nevertheless, it does now seem to have established itself as The Social Network's closest competition in that particular race (last night's win at the Producer's Guild Awards has certainly shaken things up). And if it were to win? Well, there have certainly been worse films to manage it...

VERDICT: An entertaining and rewarding film, well worth seeing.

IMDb