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Tome Nairn on 'The Queen' as prophetic elegy.

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The Queen, dir. Stephen Frears, written by Peter Morgan, starring Helen Mirren, rated M

The Queen, Stephen Frears' latest feature film, is much more than an elegy for the British monarchy. By recounting in 2006 the real elegiac events of 1998--the death of and popular lamentation for Diana, Princess of Wales--Stephen Frears has extended the target of denunciation from Crown to State. Unlike most journalistic or academic essays, Frears (who has made dozens of notable films, including My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, Dirty Pretty Things and Mrs Henderson Presents) touches upon certain deeper feelings and attitudes. Like poets, film directors may sometimes try to be unacknowledged legislators of an age--and in this case I think that some acknowledgement is due.

Thin political rectitude often dismisses such concern as sentimental or frivolous, and The Queen hasn't entirely escaped the treatment: exploitation of mere gossip, impropriety of presenting living people who can't answer back, the supposed quirks of Royal Household personalities and so on. Fortunately, few hearts touched by the tale are likely to worry over these fences. Today they stand in dire need of such legislation, even more than at the time of the dreadful events in the Paris tunnel.

Frears' focus is indeed on the stilted theatre of a regal establishment accustomed to ritual worship and obedience, and unable to understand the weird revolution going on outside its front gate. However, the accompanying point is to show how that contradiction was resolved by the other Great British Household, the one at 10 Downing Street. And the film has appeared just as the latter is writhing under a siege worse than that of Buckingham Palace in 1998. The story is of a short-lived reprieve, within a continuing historical trial and judgment. The film does use hindsight wisdom to hint at this--but after all, it's only reminding the audience of what it knows already (and not only in Great Britain).

In the film script, Helen Mirren's depth as an actress almost makes plausible a suggestion that, at the time, Queen Elizabeth may have...

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