The King’s Speech, clips and review quotes

The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane:

There is a kernel to this movie which feels harder and more stubborn than the pleasing, period fluff that enfolds it. It is there whenever Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush go head to head. When we talk of a standout performance, we mean an actor standing out against a drab or ordinary backdrop, and both of these men have specialized in outshining foolish films: Firth in “A Single Man,” Rush in “Shine.” Now they join forces to delve into a saga of genuine pain and camouflaged wrath of which the rest of Hooper’s film seems barely conscious. Logue reveals that he learned his craft while treating shell-shocked veterans of the First World War, and in Firth’s pale features—far more handsome than the real Bertie’s, but pinched with trepidation at the thought of each public appearance—we sense a grownup boy who has spent his life tiptoeing through a minefield.

More clips and quotes after the cut.

New York’s David Edelstein:

Seidler and director Tom Hooper (HBO‚Äôs John Adams) wisely play the relationship between the king and his therapist as a prickly comedy of manners. Rush wears roomy suits and, opposite Firth in his invisible corset, has a way of looking disheveled even when he‚Äôs all spruced up. Plopping himself down on the throne in Westminster, daring the outraged George to have him hauled off to the Tower, Logue is the therapist as court jester. The goal is provocation, to get the king to sputter and then vent and then curse with dismaying fluidity… It‚Äôs a prizewinning combination, terribly English and totally Hollywood, and Firth is, once more, uncanny: He evokes, in mid-stammer, existential dread.

I do have quibbles, some of them large enough to border on being issues. It’s hard to accept Guy Pearce, who plays King Edward the abdicator, as Firth’s older brother: He looks, acts, and is almost a decade Firth’s junior. Timothy Spall’s Winston Churchill is a splendid impersonation—of Alfred Hitchcock.