My maternal grandmother, who is 89, was always a staunch royalist: to her, Queen Elizabeth II represented all that was best in the British; she was the model of propriety and social grace, and a good example of the advantages of a stiff upper lip.
My grandmother felt that way until the death of Princess Diana. Then she changed tack. Suddenly she saw how the repressed and repressive royal family had used the innocent young Diana to produce an heir to the throne, lying to her all the while about Charles’s love and fidelity, and then discarding her when she got too troublesome.
It seems much of the British public felt the same way. Diana was always popular, but the spontaneous outpouring of grief that followed her death in August 1997 took a lot of people by surprise — including, it seems, the queen herself.
Stephen Frears’s movie The Queen, written by Peter Morgan, gives a nuanced portrait of what happened within the royal family after Diana was killed in that underpass in Paris. Notoriously, the queen felt that it would be unseemly to display any emotion or to put on a performance of grief for the public. But, as new Prime Minister Tony Blair understood, that sent entirely the wrong message to the British people, who were weepily surrounding Buckingham Palace with a moat of flowers in memory of “the people’s princess”.
The Queen takes us right inside Balmoral Castle in Scotland, where Elizabeth and the rest of the royal family were hiding out, and into the dynamics of the tug-of-war between the queen and Blair. He cajoled and prodded until he managed to get the queen to make some kind of public pronouncement, indicating that the royals felt at least some regret over Diana’s death and sympathised in some way with the bereaved public. Arguably, he saved the royal family from a rising tide of republicanism (nicely argued, here, by Cherie Blair), or at least the loss of their subjects’ respect and affection.
Frears has always had a knack for showing interpersonal relationships on film, and in The Queen he shows as much sensitivity to what goes on between a queen and her prime minister (and within her rather odd family) as what happens between, say, a young, white, working-class street tough and a British-Indian man from an immigrant family in the Thatcher’s Britain of My Beautiful Laundrette.
Michael Sheen is good as Blair, showing the guts beneath his relentless perkiness, but The Queen wouldn’t work at all without a strong performance in the title role. Luckily, that Frears has, in the form of Helen Mirren. (She has now played both Queen Elizabeths — the first in a 2005 TV series.)
Mirren is not quite as dumpy or thick-ankled as the present queen, but otherwise she mimics her look and style to perfection. She is also capable, as an actor, of giving us some sense of what is going on inside her mind — something the real queen simply couldn’t find herself able to do.