The Queen
- Director: Stephen Frears
- United Kingdom, 2006
If before seeing The Queen you caught the two-part television drama Elizabeth I, then you probably admired Helen Mirren’s preface to her glorious turn as our current monarch.
The Queen paints an intimate portrait of Elizabeth II during the aftermath of Diana’s death in 1997. Any portrayal of the private activities of the Royal Family is mere conjecture, of course, but there’s something direct and sympathetic about Mirren’s stoical, wise and occasionally vulnerable figure. It’s a performance well deserving of a 2007 Oscar and the same might be said of Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair, which wasn’t nominated.
Even if its audience disdains the monarchy or our present joke of a government, The Queen somehow manages to transcend all that and deliver something truly sympathetic and humanistic in its characters.
