King's speech

Some American members of the Oscar voting panels may not enjoy giving their top awards to foreigners, but in some years they have no other credible options. In 2011, they should honour Colin Firth (English) and Geoffrey Rush (Australian) for their Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor performances in The King's Speech.

They should be shoo-ins: their major competitors are a Spaniard (Javier Bardem, Biutiful) and another Brit (Christian Bale, The Fighter). Firth seems unbeatable: Bardem already has an Oscar (Best Supporting Actor, No Country for Old Men) and Firth should have won the previous year (A Single Man). It will be a sweet victory for him, slapping down Jeff Bridges (True Grit), whose victory the previous year (Crazy Heart) owed more to Hollywood sentimentality than great cinema. Rush cannot be so confident: he's already won once (Best Actor, Shine) while Bale is still an unrewarded veteran and box-office superstar, this being his first Oscar nomination. If he loses, Rush will be consoled by his executive-production stake in the very profitable movie.

Oscar's US voters may assuage their national pride by declaring The Black Swan and Darren Aronofsky the Best Picture and Director of the year (2010), even though King's Speech director Tom Hooper created the BAFTA award-winner in the Best Film category. However, Hooper didn't get the BAFTA for Best Director, which the Brit academy gave to David Fincher (for The Social Network). It is a good year for mainstream movie direction, the field also including the Coen brothers (True Grit), Danny Boyle (127 Hours), Christopher Nolan (Inception) and David O. Russell (The Fighter).

Hooper has collected an armful of awards for his direction of The King's Speech, but it isn't his "turn" to be given an Oscar. He's less than 40 years old, he's another Englishman, and much of his previous award-winning work (Prime Suspect 6, Elizabeth I, John Adams) has been in TV, which Hollywood still pooh-poohs despite the rise of HBO and other quality cable channels. Yet it is Hooper's direction that transforms a sow's ear of a screenplay into a cinematic silk purse.

A tongue-tied royal stammerer, pre-WWII Britain's Duke of York, known to his family as "Bertie" (stiff-upper-lipped Firth) is induced by his sweetly capable wife Elizabeth (twinkle-eyed Helena Bonham-Carter) into trying out one more speech therapist, an Australian rough diamond, Lionel Logue (Rush). His cavernous consulting rooms in Harley Street are a set designer's joy of stained wallpaper, high ceilings and minimalist furniture. His techniques are effectively avant-garde: bizarre bodily exercises to adjust vocal mechanisms, usage of recording discs, swearing games, shouting and dancing, self-confidence self-trickery.

The Duke's need to deliver speeches without stuttering becomes urgent when his bullying father, King George V (Michael Gambon) nears death, more so when his elder brother, David (Guy Pearce, with an upper-classy accent betraying the actor's Australian origin) philanders with an American divorcee. Obliged to abdicate by government leaders - Stanley Baldwin (Anthony Andrews), Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall), Archbishop Lang (Derek Jacobi) - David, now Edward VII, drops the poisoned chalice of kingship into his younger brother's unwilling hands.

London-raised Anglo-American screenwriter David Seidler weaves a flimsy fabric from historical facts, society gossip, class distinctions, colonial prejudices and the popular pretence that a royal family is merely a group of untrained actors muddling along like any family of unskilled misfits would. None of the royals are portrayed with convincingly imposing superiority complexes (Gambon, and Claire Bloom as his wife Queen Mary, getting closest), and the Duchess of York's toying with the novelty of a lift door looks like one of the cute "human" touches that might be ascribed to Julian (Gosford Park, Downton Abbey) Fellowes, a credited co-writer presumably hired to enhance the original screenplay.

Seidler, previously best known in Hollywood for his work on Tucker (1988), has won awards for co-writing (nearly always with Jacqueline Feather) various US TV dramas (Onassis, My Father My Son). They've also collaborated on many animated movie scripts, and Seidler reportedly found inspiration in the speech therapy drama from his own teenage stammering impediment.

In true Hollywood fashion, he presents the therapy sessions as the key dramatic element, using the "buddy movie" approach. Bertie and Lionel become an odd couple, with understanding (and under-written) wives and children. They squabble about a shilling, argue in public, drink together, share confidences, end their friendship, apologise to each other, and end up friends for life. Logue certainly found a job for life: the end credits tell us he joined King George VI for all his speeches.

Various plot details are dubious factually: the royal couple making an unchaperoned visit to Logue's home, Bertie being able to visit Logue daily without protection, Logue being given constant access and only having his qualifications checked at the last minute by the Archbishop, the ducal pair watching a newsreel of Hitler speechifying dramatically. Wisely, although Logue's grandson Mark wrote a book about "How One Man Saved the British Monarchy", the movie only makes passing references to the fate of Germany and Russian emperors. Instead, it presents a tale of one man's battle with his handicap.

The King's Speech is a good old-fashioned bioepic, buddy movie and sickness tale. Firth's surest sign of Oscar glory are the director's sympathetic close-ups of a stammering man: Hollywood's actor-voters love to see themselves portraying the afflicted.

[The movie, best actor, director and screenplay awards were won.]